Living in the Southern part of Oklahoma, I’m mostly surrounded by deeply religious and conservative people.
Usually I avoid engaging with people who you can tell are deeply engrained and don’t even question why, but there are people who will talk with me about politics and/or religion that I consider reasonable for the most part and I wanted to share what I’ve gathered.
The biggest elephant in the room I want to understand better, is how the religious right has embraced the current POTUS, while standing on their moral high horse.
The fact is, that they occupy a different reality than I do. I mean this very literally too. In their world, all liberals/progressives/atheists are evil and corrupt and just want to kill babies and destroy the country. Everything they see and hear, from social media posts, to news articles, to TV headlines reinforces this over and over until it’s common knowledge. Even the people who see Donald Trump as a con-man, have to reconcile the ‘R’ next to his name, and they will do mental gymnastics to justify and rationalize their vote. They will equivocate, obfuscate, and play down and point fingers and play ‘what-about-isms’ until their very reality isn’t in question anymore. Question a persons reality and their brain will do amazing irrational feats to defend itself.
The problem is that people in power have realized that INFORMATION is how you attack people, not weapons. The internet should have been the greatest communication and information tool ever conceived by human kind, but power/ hungry figured out how to weaponize it, and we may be too far gone...
I don’t know how we fix it...