Caregivers protecting humanity's freedoms are stressed.

Experienced caregivers like Indivisible's Rural Caucus want to help, which is why I received their five-minute video above on mindfulness this week. Also, check out Indivisible's new conversation tool, Neighbor2Neighbor.

Welcome back to my sixth Freedom for People First post at cwatts.us. I appreciate you. Empathy is the soul of democracy and crucial for expanding freedoms for all. I encourage you to make empathy (care) central to constant public discourse. All Aboard the 3:12 Empathy to Freedom Train is on page 8. Listen to Hidden Brain Innovation 2.0: The Influence You Have to learn how effectively you could expand our freedoms. Consider joining the PROJECT CARE TEAM to help me find legislative sponsors for CARE Education in your state.

THANK YOU. I am amazed that some of you read everything I send you. Please consider a paid subscription. If you do, I'll send you a complimentary copy of George Lakoff's Your Brain's Politics: How the Science of Mind Explains Our Political Divide. 

OUR DUTY TO PERSIST IN CARING

We all have a duty to care, which is the soul of our republic. The ongoing conservative attack on the democratic institutions of our republic stresses millennial caregivers protecting humanity's freedoms. There's no Ghostbusters equivalent we can call when, for example, genocide is taking place in Gaza. The cruel Project 2025 platform of Putin's wing of the GOP should be a revelation that the care wing of America needs a nurturing equivalent.

Some millennials haven't figured out that the duty to care is a lifelong duty. Progressives must commit to turning our defensive handwringing work to care into a long-term, organized daily offensive on how to care better, which must include science-based communication. We can't care for others unless we take care of ourselves.

CONSERVATISM'S LOVE FOR MASS MURDER LOOPHOLES

Progressive hearts ache at the almost 40,000 deaths of Palestinians in Gaza. Yet conservatism has numbed us to the mass murder loopholes in what they call "regulations," which we should actually call "public protections." Mass murder loopholes in our public protections account for expected annual deaths that are just part of doing business for conservatives.

For example, what about the annual needless deaths of 45,000 Americans who weren't free to access healthcare because they had no insurance? Or the annual needless deaths of 8,000 Americans who weren't free to shelter themselves with a home? Or the annual needless gun deaths of children under 18, which is children's leading cause of death.

HOW ARE YOU PERSISTING IN YOUR DUTY TO CARE TO CLOSE MASS MURDER LOOPHOLES?

I was recently at my county Democratic Party executive committee meeting, where the chair read a resignation letter from an exasperated late-20s millennial member. According to this person, our progressive POTUS and Senator hadn't pulled a Batman and Robin fast enough and made Bad Bibi and Hamas stop their killing. They had had enough. I suspect, though, that they'll be back after they've rested. They need to get back in the debate on how to close so many of our conservative mass murder loopholes.

CONVERSATION GUIDELINES FOR RESPONDING TO CONSERVATIVES

BY GEORGE LAKOFF

As a progressive in my 4th quarter of life, I experience moral outrage every day. My friendship with progressive activist, cognitive scientist, and linguist George Lakoff has helped me see the humanity in many of the misguided followers of conservatism. I especially appreciate the conversation guidelines on how to respond to conservatives found in the last chapter of his bestselling book Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate. Here's an edited excerpt. I thought of Guideline #6 when I heard the letter from the millennial. When I think of Presidential debates, I think of Guideline #21.

Four Really Important Guidelines

Respect conservatives’ 1st Amendment freedoms by understanding their moral worldview of self-interest and maximizing personal profit above everyone else. Their duty to care is limited. Be personal.

Reframe the conversation to our own moral worldview of community interest. The duty to care for all leads to expanding freedom and fairness for all. Refrain from using their language of self-interest. 

Be plain-spoken. Use the vision and values language of care, which leads to expanded freedoms for all. Every story has heroes and villains. Compare and contrast. 

Say what you want, not what you don’t want, in the expansion of freedom and fairness for all. Be plausible.

Other Linguistic Guidelines,

1. All Americans have a duty to care for one another's freedom. Empathy is the soul of democratic institutions. These core progressive values are the best of traditional American values. Stand up for our duty to care with dignity and strength. You are a true patriot because you care.
2. Remember that conservatives limit their care to themselves. Conservative ideologues have convinced half of the country that the strict father family model, which is bad enough for raising children, should govern our national morality and politics. This is the model that the best in American values has defeated over and over again in the course of our history — from the emancipation of the slaves to women’s suffrage, Social Security and Medicare, civil rights and voting rights acts, and Brown v. the Board of Education and Roe v. Wade. Each time, we have unified our country more behind our finest traditional values.
3. Remember that most people have both strict and nurturing models, either actively or passively, perhaps active in different parts of their lives. We can all be caring or cruel. Your job is to activate for politics the nurturing, progressive values already present (perhaps only passively) in your interlocutors.
4. The care wing of America protects your human rights just because you are human. Be sure to show respect to the conservatives you are responding to. They are human, too, with families. No one will listen to you if you don’t accord them respect. Listen to them. You may disagree strongly with everything that is being said, but you should know what is being said. Be sincere. Avoid cheap shots. What if they don’t show you respect? Two wrongs don’t make a right. Turn the other cheek and show respect anyway. That takes character and dignity. Show character and dignity.
5. Caring citizens avoid shouting matches. Remember that the cruel wing requires a culture war, and shouting is the discourse form of that culture war. Civil discourse is the discourse form of nurturant morality. You win a victory when the discourse turns civil. They win when they get you to shout.
6. What if you have moral outrage? You should have moral outrage. But you can display it with controlled passion. If you lose control, they win.
7. Distinguish between ordinary conservatives and nasty ideologues. Most conservatives are personally nice people, and you want to bring out their niceness and their sense of neighborliness and hospitality.
8. Be calm. Calmness is a sign that you know what you are talking about. Collaboration takes calmness.
9. Be good-humored. A good-natured sense of humor shows you are comfortable with yourself.
10. Commit to the duty to care and hold your ground. Always be on the offense. Never go on defense. Never whine or complain. Never act like a victim. Never plead. Avoid the language of weakness, for example, rising intonations on statements. Your voice should be steady. Your body and voice should show optimism. You should convey passionate conviction without losing control.
11. Conservatives have parodied progressives as weak, angry (hence not in control of their emotions), weak-minded, softhearted, unpatriotic, uninformed, and elitist. Don’t give them any opportunities to stereotype you in any of these ways. Expect these stereotypes and deal with them when they come up.
12. Use effective behavior in exercising your duty to care. Show strength, calmness, and control, an ability to reason, a sense of realism, a love of country, a command of the basic facts, and a sense of being equal, not superior. At the very least, you want your audience to think of you with respect, as someone they may disagree with but who they have to take seriously. In many situations, this is the best you can hope for. You have to recognize those situations and realize that a draw with dignity is a victory in the game of being taken seriously.
13. Many conversations advocating for care are ongoing. In an ongoing conversation, your job is to establish a position of respect and dignity and then keep it.
14. Don’t expect to convert staunch, cruel conservatives.
15. You can make considerable progress with biconceptuals, those who use both models but in different parts of their life. They are your best audience. Your job is to capture the territory of the mind. With biconceptuals, your goal is to find out, if you can by probing, just which parts of their life they are nurturant about. For example, ask who they care about the most, what responsibilities they feel they have to those they care about, and how they carry out those responsibilities. This should activate their nurturant models as much as possible. Then, while the nurturant model is active for them, try linking it to politics. For example, if they are nurturant at home but strict in business. talk about the home and family and how they relate to political issues. Example: Real family values mean that your parents, as they age, don’t have to sell their home or mortgage their future to pay for health care or the medication they need.
16. Avoid the usual mistakes. Remember, don’t just negate the other person’s claims; reframe. The facts unframed will not set you free. You cannot win just by stating the true facts and showing that they contradict your opponent’s claims. Frames trump facts. His frames will stay, and the facts will bounce off. Always reframe.
17. Our job is to make empathy, the duty to care, central to constant public discourse. If you remember nothing else about framing, remember this: Once your frame of CARE is accepted into the discourse, everything you say is just common sense. Why? Because that’s what common sense is: reasoning within a commonplace, accepted frame.
18. Never answer a question framed from your opponent’s cruel point of view: Always reframe the question to fit your values and your frames for the duty to care. This may make you uncomfortable since normal discourse styles require you to directly answer questions posed. That is a trap. Practice changing frames.
19. Be sincere. Use frames you really believe in based on the caring alues you really hold.
20. A useful thing to do is to use rhetorical questions: Wouldn’t it be better if . . . ? Such a question should be chosen to presuppose your frame. Example: Wouldn’t it be better if we had a caring president who was determined to end foreign occupations?
21. Stay away from set-ups. Fox News shows, and other rabidly cruel wing shows try to put you in an impossible situation where a conservative host sets the frame and insists on it, where you don’t control the floor, can’t present your case, and are not accorded enough respect to be taken seriously. If the game is fixed, don’t play.
22. Tell a story to illustrate our mutual duty to care. Find stories where your frame is built into the story. Build up a stock of effective stories.
23. Always start with values linked to the duty to care, preferably values all Americans share, like security, prosperity, opportunity, freedom, and so on. Pick the values most relevant to the frame you want to shift to. Try to win the argument at the duty to care values level. Pick a frame where your position exemplifies a value everyone holds - like fairness. Example: Your uncle says, “We need right-to-work laws. Unions are corrupt and run by thugs. They force you to join and take your money.” Response: “We all have a duty to care for each other's freedom. Unions make you free—free from being a slave to a company. Ethical companies protect leisure as a human right. Without a union, you have to take whatever wage the company offers, often with no pension or medical care, with no constraints on hours or scheduling, and no guaranteed overtime pay. I wouldn’t want to be a slave to a company I work for. I want to be able to eat dinner with my family and have weekend time with my kids. Leisure is a human right. Unions created weekends. People used to have to work six-day weeks for less pay than they get now. Unions created eight-hour days when people used to work ten or twelve for no more money. Unions put you on an even basis with the company. Ethical businesses work with unions, pay you fairly, treat you fairly, and respect you and your union. I’m not interested in being a slave. Whatever I pay to a union I more than make up for with pay from my job.”
24. Be prepared. You should be able to recognize the basic frames that conservatives use, and you should prepare duty to care frames to which to shift. My websiteand blog posts analyses of frameshifting. Example: A conservative says, “We should get rid of taxes. People know how to spend their money better than the government.” Reframe: “The government has made very wise investments with our public revenue. Our interstate highway system, for example. You couldn’t build a highway with your tax refund. The government built them for our common use. Or the Internet, paid for by public investments. You could not build your own Internet. Most of our scientific advances have been made through funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Institute for Health — great government investments of public revenue. Computer science was developed with public revenue, so was the satellite GPS system, so were the chips in our cell phones, and so were the wonder drugs we need. No matter how wisely you spend your own money, you’ll never get those scientific and medical breakthroughs. And how far would you get hiring your own army with your tax refund.”
25. Use wedge issues, cases where your opponent will violate some belief he holds no matter what he says. Student debt is a good example. Ask if he believes in equality of opportunity and an opportunity society, which conservatives have continuously argued for (as opposed to “equality of outcome.”) Reframe: “Many poor students with talent can only go to college if they get a government loan. But those loans cost between 6 and 12 percent interest and leave students with a mountain of debt that many cannot afford. The income from that debt yields profit for the government that is scheduled to be funneled into the general fund for many years into the future. Elizabeth Warren has proposed lowering the student debt interest rate to an affordable 3.86 percent, still giving the government some profit while making up the profit lost to the government by plugging tax loopholes that allow the rich to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. The students would then go to college, get out without a mountain of debt, and then be able to use the money they earn — not to pay off the government loans, but to get married, buy homes, and have kids, spending that money in the economy and boosting the economy and creating jobs. Do you want equality of opportunity with the poor able to afford college loans and boost the economy, or do you want to be an accomplice for billionaire thieves and kill off equality of opportunity?”
26. An opponent may be disingenuous if his real goal isn’t what he says his goal is. Politely point out the real goal, then reframe. Example: Suppose he starts touting a smaller government. Point out that conservatives don’t REALLY want a smaller government. They don’t want to eliminate the military, the FBI, the Treasury and Commerce Departments, or the nine-tenths of the courts that support corporate law. It is a big government with a dictator, they call a unitary executive, that they like. What they really want to do away with is social programs (I'm inserting that conservatives call this the administrative state) - programs that invest in people to help people help themselves. Such a position contradicts the values the country was founded on - the idea of a community where people pull together to help each other. From John Winthrop on, that is what our nation has stood for.
27. Your opponent may use language that means the opposite of what she says, called Orwellian language, feigning care. Realize that she is weak on care and the issue at hand. Use language that accurately describes what she’s talking about to frame the discussion your way. Example: Suppose she cites the “Healthy Forest Initiative” as a balanced approach to the environment. Point out that she really doesn't care about the environment. Say the initiative should be called “No Tree Left Behind” because it permits and promotes clear-cutting, which is destructive to forests and other living things in the forest habitat. Use the name to point out that the public likes forests and wants them cared for. They don’t want them clear-cut, and the use of the phony names shows weakness and cruelty on the issue. Most people want to preserve the grandeur of America, not destroy it. Don’t you?”
28. Remember once more that our goal is to unite our country behind our values, especially our duty to care. Conservative ideologues need discord, shouting, name-calling, and put-downs. We win with civil discourse and respectful cooperative conversation around the duty to care. Why? It is an instance of the nurturant model at the level of communication, and our job is to evoke and maintain the nurturant model.

Those are a lot of guidelines, and remember:

• Show respect to a human being.
• Respond by reframing.
• Think and talk at the level of values - the duty to care.
• Say what you believe.