Stop the Hate, Please. Opposition voters are just like those you Love.
When Barrack Obama was re-elected I was dismayed and sad. I honestly couldn’t believe that the majority of Americans fell for the lies the media and his administration were putting out, and they couldn’t look at the condition of our country and want to make a change. I couldn’t understand not electing a kind, high-achieving moderate Republican over a President who had failed to bring the country together, and in fact drove it further apart, and whose economic record proved incapable of pulling us out of a deep recession and probably elongating it.
I did all I could to convey my strong feelings in support of Mitt Romney and in opposition to Barrack Obama. I lost a few friends I suspect who had considerably more liberal views.
But after the election I withdrew from posting any political commentary, articles, memes, etc. I was disgusted and sad and mystified but I kept my mouth shut.
He was the best of our bad choices.
We’re now more than one week from the election of Donald Trump as President. But the hate against him hasn’t stopped. It seems to be growing and it certainly has spread. Now, according to the disappointed Hillary voters, this whole country is RACIST, and Misogynistic, and hateful. Social media is rampant with hateful and arrogant comments.
My response: REALLY? What are you thinking? You think the HATE is coming from our side? REALLY?
Casting aspersions to your Friends and Followers on Facebook and Twitter and elsewhere does nothing to advance the beliefs you claim to aspire toward. Is it correct to say you, the Hillary voter, seek unity, tolerance of different people, races, religions, sexual preferences? Is this tolerance limited to only those who believe like you do? Is this desire for unity a true wish, just as long as we keep the Conservatives and the Bible thumpers, and the “old-fashioned” out?
What I don’t get and refuse to tolerate is the fact that each and every one of us knows and loves and cares for people who vote differently politically. Hard-Right Republicans and/or Conservatives have a brother or a sister or a friend or a wife or a mom or a dad who advocates for Liberal Democratic ideas. Every Left-Wing Socialist loving Democrat loves and cares for and possibly works with another who votes and believes just the opposite.
So why do you want to hurt that person or persons? Why do you want to question their character? If their character is so bad why do you love them? Stop it! Love them as you always have. But recognize, you’re hurting them when you call them racist or hateful. You’re not caring for them when you call them whining, cry babies for not liking the results of the election.
If you love someone who thinks and votes differently than you, why can’t you recognize that others who voted like they did might be just as loving, and sweet, and fun as the person you love. Because…they are.
Black or Blue, Lives Matter
This morning I heard a news pundit on CNN commenting on the horrible attacks on police in Dallas and the police shooting of a driver in Minnesota during which he referred to the “African American/Hispanic” community. He said it as if they are one and the same. This got me thinking. They are not the same. We are a nation divided by numerous cultures. And these cultures are increasingly at each other’s throats.
News of yesterday’s shooting of police in Dallas, Texas left me feeling pretty numb this morning as I prepared for a work day. Five brave men were killed and seven others were shot apparently by a 25 year old black man who claimed to be acting alone because he was upset at white people. Before being killed by police trying to apprehend him, he said he wanted to kill white people, especially cops.
This young man lived in a Dallas suburb and had served six years in the Army Reserves. Sadly there is little doubt he was influenced by the hateful, and ignorant comments made in recent years by many including our President, the Democratic Presidential nominee and the organization Black Lives Matter. They’ve all given voice to the myth that there is a systematic (as Obama has said) or systemic (as Clinton has said) racist problem among America’s police forces.
My unique persepctive: I’m a 50+ year old white man. Thirty-two years ago I met and later married a black woman. We were married 28 years and lived together over 30. I have three kids, 2 are adults, all of whom identify as black. After my divorce I was fortunate to meet and get into a relationship with a beautiful Mexican woman who came to the U.S. at age 13 and became a legal citizen in her 20s. For most of the past year we’ve seen each other 5-6 days per week.
The black community in the very liberal Seattle area where I live is distinct and separate from the white community and certainly from the Hispanic community. Generally speaking they live lives much different, with much different views, different interests, different celebrities, and different heroes than the nearly all-white suburban Seattle community in which I grew up.
It’s no different in the Hispanic community. Though my Mexican-American girlfriend was smart and professionally accomplished and had lived in both Seattle and San Diego, California for her entire adult life her knowledge of most pop or celebrity or sports personalities, events or history that I and many others take for granted was close to zero. And the same was true of many of her Hispanic friends from work and church. Hispanic people, at least in the Seattle-Tacoma area, associate with and live amongst themselves having little interaction with whites, or black either.
I’m confident were I to embed myself as thoroughly in the Asian or Gay communities I would be writing the same thing about them.
These different and diverse communities are not talking to one another. At best they’re talking at each other. At worst, they’re yelling at each other.
The Black Lives Matter movement was established on a lie that continues to be perpetrated and continues to harden the hearts of African-Americans across the country. If you’re black and you’re raised to believe that police are racist and that they WILL shoot you; of course you’re going to defend yourself and shoot back, or fight, or resist arrest. The same is true of Hispanics. Black Lives Matter, Barrack Obama, Hillary Clinton and much of the news media nationwide fed the beast that said Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri was an innocent and sweet little teenager who was gunned down by a cop for no good reason while Brown had his hands raised, essentially giving himself up. It’s a myth, but a widely believed myth.
Here are the facts: Little to no evidence exists that Brown had his hands raised and was humbly subjugating himself to a police officer. Witnesses who initially made such claims, recanted them when interviewed by police. There is clear evidence that Brown robbed a convenience store just prior to his confrontation with police. He assaulted the store clerk. He assaulted the police officer and tried to take his gun. And upon withdrawing from an initial scuffle charged the police officer before being shot. And Michael Brown was 6-foot 5-inches tall and weighed 289 pounds. Not a little guy.
While not to the same extent these myths or exaggerations have also been forwarded in numerous other police shootings and in the Travon Martin case. It’s a narrative that has infected the black community, the separate and at times isolated black community. It’s also permeated the Hispanic community. How many people think Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump hates Mexicans because he called them all rapists and drug dealers? He never said that. NEVER. But you believe he did because its been so reported on social media and even some mainstream media. What Trump said was a reference to illegal immigrants NOT all Mexicans or Hispanics. And he didn’t say all of them were rapists and drug dealers. He actually and accurately said, “Many of them are nice people” in the sort-of off the cuff manner that has endeared him with many and caused rancor with his opponents (It should be pointed out that these opponents wouldn’t support Trump if he had a halo above his head and angel’s wings on his back).
While the United States remains approximately 63% white that number has been decreasing for decades and is not likely to reverse course. Nor is it likely to reverse course that these divided communities will come together when we continue to elect leaders who repeatedly and strategically divide us with their rhetoric and activities.
I love the differences in the people and communities in which I have been in indoctrinated. And I love that I have almost always been eagerly welcomed in those communities. But when you’re the only white guy or gringo in the room, as has been my case many, many, many times over the past 30+ years you notice. And so do they.
What has always worked for me is to be curious and interested in the people with whom I’m around. And when difference come up I’m not afraid to talk about them. I think its helped me many times over the years.
We’re all Americans. We’re not “us” and “them”. Having separate racial, or cultural communities is fine. But lets not act like one is better than the other…as the whites, the black, the hispanics and I suppose others have done too often in recent years. Cops are NOT trying to kill black people. Those bad ones who make mistakes should justly be punished. But treat each case individually and please, please, please reject the demigods who claim systemic or systematic racism that simply doesn’t exist. Read the meaning of the words if you don’t know what it means…Hillary.
In the infamous words of another bad guy who was portrayed as a victim, “Can’t we all just get along”?
Your thoughts are welcome. Thanks for visiting.
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What Business Owners Want
Total Broadcasting’s Picture/Quote Service is great at improving interactivity between businesses and their customers.
My personal habits, likes and dislikes provide for some interesting contradictions. One that I admit to is the fact that I like quality service and products for myself and for my customers. In the eyes of many my other more overriding quality is that I am quite thrifty. Not cheap. I just don’t like spending money unnecessarily.
As with many I have translated my personality and preferences into what is offered my clients through Total Broadcasting Service, my video and audio production company in Seattle. I could get into great detail, but I won’t. Simply put, business owners want quality and lots of money-spending customers…but they don’t want to pay for it. Business owners want marketing exposure and the results good marketing and branding provides…but they don’t want to do a darn thing to facilitate this marketing. They want you to do it for them. And far too many don’t want to pay you for the work you provide.
Hmmm….so as an owner of a business-to-business company with a goal of pleasing our customers and helping those business owners achieve their business and personal goals how do we overcome this clear contradiction in business owners wants?
Here is our personal example. Total Broadcasting Service was a pioneer in the video-marketing for the web services that are growing exponentially now. When we added video to our menu of services nearly 5 years ago our primary goal was to provide the service inexpensively, thus complying with this authors personal beliefs and desire to be thrifty. We worked hard to get early customers in a field for which we had nearly no experience. Upon reflexion I can say our videos weren’t very good. But they were cheap. Our practice was to get a customer, take their money, produce their video and provide it to them and then thank them, hoping they would use their videos well and call us again in the future with orders for more work.
You can probably guess what happened. The business owners took the videos and (presumably) stored them in their computers never to be seen again…by anyone…most notably their customers or potential customers. The business owners didn’t have the acumen or the time to acquire it to post their own marketing videos anywhere on the internet including their Social Media (“What’s that? Oh you mean Facebook and Tweeter or whatever its called?”) or their websites. As a result few of them called us back for more work and some looked at their time and money invested in the creation of the video as a waste.
Graphic Facebook Insights shows tremendous improvement in customer interactivity while employing added services, and a decrease when not.
So, we had some work to do. We chose to improve our services. Going forward, anyone we sold a video was going to have us post that video onto their own YouTube Channel, and if they didn’t have one we would create one for them; and we would post that YouTube video onto their Facebook business page, and if they didn’t have one we would create one for them.
Simultaneously while assuring that the videos we produced for our customers would at least have a chance of being seen or found we worked diligently at improving the quality of our videos. We learned better editing and production techniques and programs. We learned better methods and got better equipment for when we shot video.
The results were wonderful. As expected our customers benefited from the changes we implemented and didn’t mind the slight increases in pricing these changes required. And they showed their pleasure by routinely renewing their orders with us and keeping us growing as a company.
Skip forward a couple of years to 2014. The internet, marketing, search engines and social media are all constantly changing. What worked yesterday may no longer be a best practice. So it was with our video, social media, and internet marketing service. We added services since it became apparent our customers needed those added services to best market themselves and grow their business. With the added services our prices increased.
The good news is we made more money with a few customers who added these extra services and we were quickly able to graphically show results for our customers. The added services and expenses were proving to be worth it. The bad news…not enough business owners wanted or could afford to pay for the added services we felt would be necessary in today’s world of internet advertising. So we lost out on too many customers we otherwise might have been able to sign-up had we been offering them the earlier diminished services at lower prices.
The lesson learned; a lesson that is an age-old lesson in business, don’t give the customers what you think they need. Give the customers what they want. But we don’t have to be so cold about it. There is good news on the other side of this seemingly dark lesson. Once you give the customer what they want, you earn their trust. Upon earning their trust…you can add to the services you provide and grow your business with the customers you already have. After all, it’s an age-old business adage that 80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers. In following this method everybody wins. And isn’t that what you were shooting for to begin with?
Make providing your customer what they want your top priority, work your butt off to make it serve them as best possible. Upon earning their trust and serving their wants…approach them again…give them what they need…and subsequently serve them better.
Thanks for visiting. Comments are welcome.
Call for Video Production Services: 425-687-0100
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