Less FAFO, more JOWO

If we want a bigger tent, we have to leave the flaps wide open.

There are some statements I see a lot online.

They’re used in response to MAGA voters expressing varying degrees of remorse, or elected GOP officials, expressing varying degrees of concern or disagreement with the White House.

Womp womp

Oh, lookie who’s just hit the FO phase of FAFO.

Leopards/Faces

Hope you have the day you voted for!

You know what I don’t see enough?

Welcome! We’ve been waiting for you.

So here’s a hastily coined acronym to consider:

JOWO: The Joy of Welcoming Onboard.

(Or something better.)

Before you roll your eyes, call me a Pollyanna, and rethink your subscription, I hope you’ll hear me out.

I’m not going to claim that schadenfreude isn’t real. Or that my first instinct is to open my arms to people whose views are deeply offensive to me.

And honestly, I love Adrian Bott’s enduring (2015!) Leopards/Faces meme with all my heart; it strikes right to the heart of the irony of imagining you’d be spared the cruelty that you only voted for others to endure.

I am not the Dali Lama and I am not Ghandi, and I can’t sit here in pure forgiveness, my heart filled with benevolence and my arms full of perky daisies for those people who voted a certain way (or didn’t vote at all, in some kind of misguided protest, gah) — because their direct actions contributed to electing the people who trample the constitution, inflict pain on the people I love, direct needless cruelty on our most vulnerable citizens and residents, violate objective standards of decency and morality, destroy science innovation, take away jobs, and abuse power to intimidate universities and law firms and media networks and tech companies and independent judges and frankly, regular people of all kinds who just want to live their lives.

You.

Me.

Our families. Our kids.

I mean, it’s infuriating.

It hurts.

Of course it’s human to dislike people who hurt us. It’s even healthy, or so I’m told.

But it’s not healthy for us to be angry all the time. Which is why try to heed my own advice about overwhelm, and spend a lot more time in the car in the company of Sirius XM First Wave. (No offense to Nicolle, Jen, Ana, and Ari.)

I also know it’s not effective to shame or yell at someone who’s showing indications of wanting to do the right thing.

It may feel good in the moment to tell someone to “Have the day you voted for!” but there is zero value in making another deposit into the Bank of Told You So.

Isn’t the goal here to change all the hearts and minds we can? Build a strong coalition? Make the government work for more people in need?

Fix shit?

We have hit a tipping point in which things are, in fact, unimaginably awful. You see it. I see it. It’s time to get strategic, and we have so much opportunity.

Republican Senators admit they are scared of retaliation. Elizabeth Warren tells us that GOP Senators no longer make eye contact, which I interpret as a sign that they are either paralyzed by fear or filled with shame. Probably both.

This is the time to push past our basest instincts, be smart, and get all the elected officials and voters we can to join us in doing the right thing. Now.

Or as Anand Giriharadas wrote this morning on The Ink, we push them to be brave.

I think so often of the gentleman who stood up at Democratic Congressman Paul Tonko’s town hall (start at 4:10), declaring to raucous applause, “If you asked us to show up, we will show up.”

He continued, “When I saw you next to Maxine Waters, I was so proud that my representative was on the front line right there. But I thought about Jimmy Carter and I thought about John Lewis and I know what John Lewis would have done. He would have gotten arrested that day. Make them outlaw you. We will stand behind you. We will be there with you.”

He didn’t scold him; he gave him an opportunity to show even more bravery.

There’s science behind this. And we’re a pro-science community here, right?

If you haven’t read

Adam Grant

’s book, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know, here’s a gift link to a NYT article of his about changing minds.

When we try to change a person’s mind, our first impulse is to preach about why we’re right and prosecute them for being wrong. Yet experiments show that preaching and prosecuting typically backfire — and what doesn’t sway people may strengthen their beliefs.

So what does work?

It’s called motivational interviewing, a technique developed by psychologists for treating substance abuse issues. Turns out, it also is wildly successful at changing the minds of voters.

The essence of it, Grant writes, is that “instead of trying to force other people to change, you’re better off helping them find their own intrinsic motivation to change.”

Ask open-ended questions, listen, repeating their thoughts back to them. Then, when they express a desire for change or to seek another path, you help guide them toward a plan.

Senator Murkowski, can you gather your colleagues to spearhead a bipartisan coalition to hold people in power accountable for abuses of power? Tell us what you need and we will stand behind you.

Remorseful Trump Voter, I’m sorry this is happening to your small business. That sounds really awful. Would you consider looking at this bipartisan bill for reining in these random tariffs that are hurting people like you? You can even call your member of congress and ask them to support it.

(Okay, I am not a trained therapist. But you get the idea.)

A big tent of minifig heads. Photo: Nik on Unsplash.

Whenever my instinct is to say something snarky of the FAFO variety — which is more often than I’d like — I remind myself that the big win isn’t dunking on some rando in a pile-on on Threads.

It feels a whole lot better to have a productive conversation that inspires even a single additional person to join our fight and embiggen our big tent. I always walk away feeling hopeful. And I know I really need that hope to keep going.

That’s JOWO.

(Or something better.)

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