Wendy Smith

And so we start really intensifying our point of view.

And then we get into what we call trench warfare, where once we start getting into groups that reinforce our point of view, it's like building a trench, defensively reinforcing what we think and sitting there and shooting against the other side, really sort of being offensive against the other side and attacking.

And that's what we see in our political system right now.

And by doing so, we lead to what we call the pattern of

overcorrecting or a wrecking ball where we sort of shoot decision-wise from one end of the spectrum all the way to the other crashing down anything good that the middle has created along the way and by overcorrecting creating this wrecking ball where we wreck what's happened and so we've seen that in in the abortion decision where the two sides are so polarized that what we're doing is we're wrecking any possibility for creating a better outcome in which we can see possibilities in the middle

And so we talk about this as a vicious cycle, the vicious cycle of either or thinking, and we really do believe that both and thinking means that we recognize that actually both sides of this discussion have points in which they really agree with one another, that there is a lot of conversation in which

we are trying to sanctify life, life of the mother and life of the fetus, where we are trying to enable opportunities and choice and that both sides have points of connection, but we're not talking about that.

And by living in these sort of very polarized, by taking these either or positions and then living in these very polarized ways of doing so, we're creating worse policy and we're leading to sort of these massive pendulum swings that are causing major problems.

Yeah, and this goes right back to the emotional piece.

I was just thinking as you were talking about this.

So in the last couple of days, I've seen those emotions play out on my social media feed.

I've seen them play out in the conversations that I've had.

And the emotions come out in a couple of ways.

One is the deep anxiety, fear, uncertainty that people are feeling many times because of some really significant and legitimate background experiences that they have in response to this decision.

But I've also seen the emotions of anxiety as there are people who are

in families or in friend groups in which they have different opinions from their family and friends and are really feeling torn about having those conversations with one another and just feeling how emotionally challenging it is to be at the kitchen table with their spouse, having a conversation where they each have different perspectives and how hard that is.

And so we are incredibly empathetic to the fact that navigating these kinds of both ands

is hard when they show up in ourselves.

And it's even harder when they show up in these kinds of political fights in which we have some real stakes in the game, moral claims, or we have some real emotional or experiential claims.

And so we don't say this lightly, but we do think that part of navigating paradox and living in the both end is finding comfort in the discomfort.