A Lesson on ‘Common Ground’
The chain attaching these two men is not something they were born with. It is also something that they did not choose. This chain was attached to them by their oppressors. Their oppressors attached the chain to these two men because they knew that it was a force divider. Attach one to another and make them both less than one. This tactic works for the oppressor as long as the two refuse to cooperate. The oppression depends on them not cooperating, and their success and survival depends on them cooperating.
These two men are philosophically opposed. Each sees the other as his inferior, motivated by hate. Each is determined to not subordinate himself to the other because of their philosophical differences. At first, they see their respective races as their uniforms, determining their choices. Their oppressor’s tactic of attaching them to one another demonstrated to each of them that they had more in common than they did not. Once they realized that, they made progress.
The important thing to keep in mind is that they did not find common ground by eliminating the philosophical differences by allowing one to be the conqueror, and the other being conquered. That is not how ‘common ground’ works. They found common ground by “going around the swamp.” They focused on mutual need, and used one another as force multipliers, rather than allowing differences to be force dividers.
If you fail to find common ground, you are finding common ground. You are just helping an oppressor that you can’t see. The person who attached the chain is the oppressor, not the person on the other end of the chain.
05/16/2023 @ 12:25 pm
“The person who attached the chain is the oppressor, not the person on the other end of the chain.”
I agree and can live with that assessment…
05/16/2023 @ 1:14 pm
Government and civilization exist because life is not utopian. Certain things exist that challenge civilization, like racism, and racists. Racism needs to be minimized, but it can’t be eliminated. Absolutist approaches are nearly as big an “existential threat” to civilization as the problems that they are focused on.
For centuries it was thought to be impossible to reach the Moon. It was far too distant to build a rocket capable of carrying enough fuel to reach the moon…to say nothing of returning. Ultimately, approaching the Moon required a circuitous path. It was counter-intuitive, but physically sound. We could not carry enough fuel to overcome Earth’s gravity to get there and back. You might say that Earth and the Moon opposed the effort. What we did was use the Moon’s and Earth’s gravitational power to “slingshot” us home.
By learning a way to work with Earth’s power, we learned how to travel throughout the solar system and beyond. Power is power, and force is force. Levers and slingshots are ancient methods of multiplying power beyond what can be muscled up by mere one dimensional push-pull. Human history is replete with overcoming an oppressive level of power by changing direction. Karate and Judo use methods of redirecting impetus provided in a direct attack, essentially borrowing power. Most of what is done “in the course of human events” involves some way of redirecting power rather than squashing it, or opting out of dealing with it. Practically everything that humans have made involves some sort of cooperation on ‘common ground’.
05/16/2023 @ 3:17 pm
” The oppression depends on them not cooperating, and their success and survival depends on them cooperating.”
It is in this regard that the oppressor has inadvertently made them cooperating equals in their struggle to escape.
05/16/2023 @ 4:49 pm
I prefer to see this as two individuals rising to a higher level by recognition of their power united rather than the failure of an oppressor to execute a tactic effectively. The oppressor did not create equals. Equality is their natural state, as natural law, and justice, and self awareness would see it. The oppressor merely applied the chain, and fomented their hatred of one another. Their ennobling act was to find common purpose and power despite differences.
There is more to the story. Tony Curtis is from the South, and Poitier is from the North. There is a swamp to the North of them, so Curtis wants to go South. Poitier does not want to go South because he knows of a train to the North, if they can get around the swamp. Curtis allows himself to be led by a man who he repeatedly tells to not “tell him what to do.” These fictional characters worked their way to their freedom by seeking common ground. Attributing their success to a mistake by their oppressor is akin to awarding the slave ship captain with beneficence and largesse for bringing Black people to America.
05/16/2023 @ 11:02 pm
“It is in this regard that the oppressor has inadvertently made them cooperating equals in their struggle to escape.”
I didn’t say that the oppressor made them equals but “cooperating equals”…
The oppressor created the conditions which results in their cooperation…
The oppressor is, at least in part, an unwitting author of the cooperation which arises between the two men who might otherwise be adversaries or enemies.
05/16/2023 @ 11:16 pm
What does it have to do with anything that the oppressor made…? Are you just constitutionally incapable of acknowledging that these two men demonstrate the principle of common ground while being philosophically opposed? Will you dissolve into a puddle if you admit that it makes the point? Jesus, Ron, it is better to admit the obvious than to make specious deflections.
It is a fictional story. The screenwriters did not create a plot that lauds the Southern jailers. The heroes are the escaped prisoners. The credit is theirs. Your theory is wack. Fess up.
05/17/2023 @ 9:11 pm
I was posting a response to this last night around 11:16, which is past my bedtime. I had a 7am gym appointment, so when my wife made this observation, I did not descend the stairs again to post it.
Here’s what she said.
Giving the “oppressor” credit as the “unwitting author”…in this weird, weird attempt at avoiding the obvious, is just like saying that the Nazis were “unwitting authors” of Anne Frank’s diary. The notion is obscene.
05/19/2023 @ 12:51 am
I agree with your wife. It makes no sense to give oppressors credit for triggering a response to oppression unless the oppression is phony and designed to draw such a response.
The idea of common ground when dealing with racists is not about accepting racism. It would be more accurate to say that finding common ground is a way to demonstrate to the opposition that they have a priority that supersedes whatever racism they have in a given situation, thereby blunting the impact of racism in that particularly area or situation.
We know that Black people get incarcerated way, way out of proportion to their numbers. And yet there are people who we would consider racists who are voting to reduce sentences because long sentences are expensive and not necessarily effective at crime prevention. And so we get cooperation reducing a consequence of racism, not by eliminating racism but by changing focus.
I’ll give you a different kind of example:
In North Carolina, when I lived there, the state legislature introduced something called Amendment One, a state amendment defining marriage as being between a man and a woman. This is before the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage nationally. In Greensboro, where I lived (and will presumably live again in a few years), Black pastors supported Amendment One for religious reasons. My then head rabbi brought Rev. William Barber to town to talk to them. He told them they were looking at Amendment One wrong and that it was not primarily a religious issue but a civil rights issue. He persuaded them and though Amendment One passed statewide it went down in Greensboro. Those pastors might have remained primarily homophobic for religious reasons but civil rights trumped their homophobia. That’s a classic way to use common ground.
05/19/2023 @ 5:53 am
Thanks, KS. That is very helpful.
05/17/2023 @ 8:56 am
Sticking a hand outside of my cone of personal space for a minute to mention that Obama’s media group, called Higher Ground, just now dropped their new doc called ‘Working’ on Netflix. It’s about people from all walks of life, working.
Says the best president we may ever have:
“For eight years, people from every walk of life would share their stories with me. They’d tell me their hopes, their dreams, their struggles, and often, their work. It gave me a glimpse into the lives of people I might never have met otherwise, and served as constant source of perspective, inspiration, and challenge.”
Many times, I’ve thought that Michelle Obama was wrong wrong wrong about her push for us to remain on higher ground. Many times, I wish Dems would take off the gloves, punch a few GOP faces. Then, here are the Obamas with the Obama Foundation, to educate and train young people as community leaders and future politicians, and Higher Ground, to entertain and educate a new crop of people regardless of color.
In the photo, the fantasy I did not know I had until I saw it, President Obama at the supermarket, chatting with a woman and her child while he pushes her cart along the produce aisle. That is common ground to me.
05/17/2023 @ 12:16 pm
That is a rather amazing photo. I am hoping that maybe I’ll see him at some home DIY store when I get busy ripping down wallpaper and painting.
As for being on “higher ground”, (it’s kind of funny because when I tried to the that, it typed “tiger ground”…which sounds more like where you’d want Democrats to be). I recall the sense that the Obamas wanted to have the first Black first family to be only seen as dignified. That certainly leaves room for other Democrats not in the family to bend some noses.
05/17/2023 @ 1:37 pm
Hear you abt the nose punching, or at least playing a bit dirtier. However, you know they’d seize on every punch and inflate it to crushing radical left Marxist BLM antifa aggression. Also, I’d hate to see us drop low enough to make fun of suffering people like John Fetterman and Nancy Pelosi’s husband and E. Jean Carroll. Let them display their indecency and make it unique to them.
Btw, you’ll have to move to Chicago in order to run into Obama at Lowe’s, and am guessing you’ll have to elbow dozens of women out of the way 🙂
05/17/2023 @ 12:16 pm
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05/17/2023 @ 1:09 pm
Bitey,
I jumped to your text without watching the clip first.
By doing so I saw your statement ” They found common ground by “going around the swamp.” ” as being stand alone, a concoction solely of your own rather than just a mini-review of the film clip’s story.
It flew off the page and made my cat jolt when I shouted ” Yes ! That’s it ! ”
I worked as a a field mediator sometime back, sent by local and county police to the homes of warring neighbors. My mission was to never take sides but to find “common ground”. My standard self introduction was tell each party that I was not on their side nor that of their nemesis. Once credibility was established, we could get around the swamp and find what could join them together. It was most often a pledge to stop the fighting. A set of “common ground” statements were written down and each party was asked to sign it. There wasn’t any enforcement other than it gave people at odds with each other a chance to see they had commonality. It was pointed out that to discontinue the agreement was to call in to question their own validity.
My office settled 625 of these cases in the first year. I personally handled 125 of them while the balance went to the 17 other individuals in the field.
I was fortunate to have done this in my late 20’s and have never forgotten the power of “going around the swamp”.
05/17/2023 @ 2:18 pm
That is a very helpful piece of expertise, Art. I had actually forgotten that you did some conflict resolution stuff.
Yeah, common ground is not about sitting in judgment on any particular issue. It is about finding passable roads practically anywhere else. Our species would no longer exist without it.
05/17/2023 @ 8:03 pm
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05/18/2023 @ 3:27 pm
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