Enough is enough! I am so tired of provocative photos and videos and other various posts and tweets that offer no real opportunity for dialogue. Social media is infected with rhetoric: language and images designed to have a persuasive or impressive effect on its audience — to rile us up. But these posts are too often rooted in questionable compassion or sincerity, bound in ulterior motives, and lack meaningful content. Social media is an echo chamber: it’s all noise, where dialogue is impossible. I’m sorry folks, but provocative posts and their ensuing comments don’t count as discussion for me!

Because it’s too easy to throw out an unanswerable, unsubstantiated opinion on Facebook, social media is not where change happens. It happens when we engage each other face-to-face. Either we engage in a constructive dialogue and learn to live with each other, or we don’t engage and it kills us — socially, spiritually, emotionally, or worse.

What if we actually had a roundtable discussion, perhaps at the Alkebulan Cultural Center in Pasadena, to talk about sociocultural issues, and to interact in real life? I’d like to explore ways to encourage better dialogue about a variety of topics — perhaps hosting live events — and hope we can spark some real discussion.  If we want to see our world change for the good of us all, then we need person-to-person dialogue, so we can build relationships that can learn to withstand disagreement.

I’ll keep you posted about this idea and other developments. Please let me know if you want to get together and talk.

This piece first appeared in Zanaida’s February 2017 newsletter.
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