Forum Post: We're all on the same side!

I have heard a lot of posturing and a lot of vitriolic rhetoric coming from people on "both sides". The fact is that people are assuming that the majority of people at OWS are doing and believe "such and such". And likewise, people are assuming that majority of the 1 percenters (or Tea partiers or whoever) are believing and doing such and such. People are ASSUMING that they know what the majority of people are like when in fact they do not know. When you analyze this view logically, you will see that every individual is different and that you cannot possibly claim to know what even a majority of people are like just because they happen to be expressing frustration in the same spot about the same thing.

This is the main problem. The media industrial complex creates these rigid ideologies because it makes good TV and good political theater. It's classic "us/them" psychology...whatever us is, there must be a them to oppose us and they are automatically wrong since they are not us. When we drop the isms and us and them mentality, we are discovering over and over again that Americans on both "sides" are actually moderates and mostly reasonable people who both desire solutions to the problems we face. We have to stop attacking each other. I hear it from both sides all the time. We need to realize that we are all on the same side because the decisions we make affect us all. I have been talking to people who come from "the other side" and all I hear is defensiveness because they feel as though they are being attacked! Once I come diplomatic, they drop the defense and we realize that we do not actually disagree on most things. We may have minor disagreements on the tax code, but we all agree that wall street criminals (notice the language...this is not to say that all people from wall street are criminals, but in the wake of the crisis, some certainly are) should have been held accountable for the mess they put us in. We all agree that health care is broken and needs repairing. We all agree that the national debt is out of control. We have much more in common that in difference and I think the more we support CIVIL discourse and the more we present our ideas in a clear and logical fashion, the more that this will become apparent.