Welcome to communication

I first heard about the Women’s March in Washington in early December last year. As soon as I did, I used my frequent flyer miles to get a ticket from my home in Northern California to Washington, DC. I knew I had to go and figured I would find friends to join me later. Well, none of my friends wanted to travel to DC to attend the March. Most of them attended Sister Marches in LA, San Francisco, Oakland and Walnut Creek, California. I was going to DC. I did not care that I was going to be the only one I knew there, but if I was going to go, I wanted to make good use of the trip. So, I signed up to attend an event associated with the March about training for activists with Ralph Nader as the keynote speaker. I attended a workshop on communicating across economic and racial cultures for community organizers. The bottom line message of the two-hour workshop was that when professional organizers and local activists talk, they use different language. Professional activists use words like “mobilization,” “process,” and “benchmark.” Many of these words have little meaning outside of an academic environment. The people on the ground, the Union member/organizers, the community leaders who came up from the ground, use words like “jobs,” “housing,” and “healthcare.” Community leaders use words that make sense in the real world.They use words that make sense to people on either coast as well as in the middle. Words even 45 can understand. That started me thinking about how we talk to each other in the current political environment.
That workshop was not the beginning of my experiments in communication. As a psychologist, the core of what I do every day is looking at how communication and behavior interact. I also had a brief stint in radio that required me to look at how I can express myself in simple language. My children were young at the time, and I was working with a coach who encouraged me to use the same vocabulary I would use with them. I had used the word “primate” in one show. The problem with that advice is that I never used a simple vocabulary with my children. The idea that I need to use clear language to explain complex concepts is not new to me. The idea of applying it to activism is.

Return home

I, like many of you, returned home with the realization that marching was not enough. I started joining groups: Indivisible, Move On, Justice Democrats. Those are in addition to the groups I already belonged to: my Union, May Day PAC, and End Citizen’s United. I read the Indivisible Guide and attended more town hall meetings. I joined more Facebook groups than you can shake a stick at, as my mother would have said. (My mother would have said, “shake a stick.” She didn’t have a Facebook account. If she had, she would have had lots of followers. She was a hoot.) One such town hall meeting was an empty chair town hall for Diane Feinstein sponsored by Indivisible East Bay. She was not there, but UC Berkeley professor George Lakoff was. He is a cognitive linguist who has done groundbreaking work on how we understand the political landscape. He has updated many of his earlier works, including Don’t Think About Elephants, to help us to understand and resist the agenda of the right since the election of 45. That further piqued my interest in how to talk to one another. How do we craft a message that makes sense to people of different backgrounds? A message that does not leave people out the conversation.
​Writing the paragraph above is a perfect example of the process. I wanted to say, “How do we craft a message that resonates with people from various socioeconomic strata?”
I knew I was interested in the topic of messaging from early on in this fight. I just was not sure what that was going to look like for me, which seems to be true for a lot of activists. I’ve talked to a lot of people out there who are making phone calls and attending meetings, but they feel untethered in their activism. This blog is my focus. I’m going to be talking about many of George Lakoff’s concepts, including framing and moral politics. I will also be integrating what I’ve learned about communication after 30+ years in clinical practice as a psychologist including 15 years in California’s prison system. I will be talking about issues as they arise. I will be sharing what I learned from talking to Republicans as well as
conservatives in the Democratic Party.

For now, here are some things for us all to keep in mind:

1. Resistance is a marathon, not a sprint. Don’t get discouraged. We must be in this for the long haul. Take care of yourself, take care of each other, and don’t give up.
2. When I was in China, our guide told us that there are 1.3 billion people in China. If the people oppose some government action, the government is constricted in its ability to impose that policy. The same thing is true here. If Americans want something, it will happen.
3. Like I keep telling all my union brothers and sisters when we stand together, management is more afraid of us than we are of them. The ultra-wealthy want to shut everyone else out of the system because they fear us. That means we have power. So, we must use that power to create an America that is better for everyone, including the Koch brothers.

Coming up we will be talking about communication skills, messaging for specific issues, communication heroes of the progressive movement, and much more. Stay tuned. 
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Please, tell us your story in the comment section.

Refrences
Lakoff, G. (2004, 2014) Don't Think of an Elephant! White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing