Mónica Guzmán

You mentioned earlier in this conversation, how awesome it is actually when a curious conversation helps us understand what we think,

When somebody asks us that, what a gift it is to actually be like, oh, do my ideas cohere?

And to see some of the contradictions and dissonance in our own narratives.

I was going to call one of my chapters early on by a phrase that somebody said that gave me an I never thought of it that way moment.

And the phrase was, meaning is in people, not words.

And it really struck me because...

We, I think, can become very legalistic with each other about words and about language and about what is meant by them.

Because we so often spend time in communities that are like-minded, we develop our own language and then we begin to think this is the only right language.

And in fact, when people use different language, it's clearly because they oppose

what our language encodes and embodies and supports.

They oppose these things, but there's other places where the words themselves encode certain values and some people's political perspective doesn't feel well reflected in a certain term.

So, for example, there's sort of voter rights, voter suppression, voting integrity, trustworthy elections.

What is the best name

for what's going on with elections right now.

And depending on what your biggest concern is, you might think voter suppression is by far the best name.

Or you might think that voter security, voting security and election security is by far the best name.

So how can you have the same conversation?

How do you make sure that you don't

take the fact that someone's using a different name as all of a sudden, that's it, it's over.

I can be certain that they believe these things that would oppose me.