Texans helping each other during the flooding caused by hurricane Harvey have shown us the innate goodness within most people. It shows that peace is possible between the ordinary people who are on the left and right of the political spectrum. Journalists should help make peace not foment discord.

With everyone screaming racist, this is what I am seeing. Americans🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/e9j4q7D610

— John D Doe (@ARsRcool) August 31, 2017

Politicians and journalists often demonize people on the other side of the political spectrum because of the actions of a few extremists. This causes people on the other side to believe they are hated by the first side. It also creates a false impression in the minds of the public that everyone on the other side is an extremist. The news media acts like a person going between two people lying about what one said about the other trying to start a fight between them. Politicians and journalists are unlikely to change their ways so the ordinary people on both sides have to try to see through the illusion spun by the hate mongers and remember what we have learned in the aftermath of hurricane Harvey.

Related Articles: Healing the Polarization in America

Below is a comment I left on an article by Mike Cernovich at Mediium.com

https://medium.com/@henrybartholomewcranbury/mike-ed3a3adc62c4

Mike, 

This is somewhat off topic, but I saw your interview on the Alex Jones Show. Alex and you were talking about how the Texas disaster has brought people together and how that is influencing the media and politicians, making them want to get on the side of goodness. That is a great story. It shows that, as you say, most people have goodness within them - as the people of Texas showed by helping each other regardless of race, ethnicity etc. 

Later Alex moved on to literal demonization of liberals. I am not a fan of the left but part of the problem in our country is that each side hears about the worst of the other side on videos and develops a false worldview that the other side are all like the extremists. It’s like someone who talks to two different people lying about what the other said about them in order to start a fight between them. When people hear other side hates them they naturally hate the other side. 

Many “journalists” and politicians push the anger, fear and hate because it get viewers and votes. I know you and Alex are above that so I hope you will have a talk with Alex about ways to counter the mutual misunderstanding. You recognized that people have goodness within them. The question is to figure out how to appeal to their best nature not reinforce their anger and hate through demonization, literal or figurative. 

Thanks

Also posted to Alex Jones' facebook page:

A woman from Detroit, Michigan who was in Las Vegas during the 1 October attack expressed similar sentiments in a YouTube video (below):

At 38:01 she says:

People who want to try to make this a racial or political situation, it may very well be, but I will tell you this, when I was in that basement with people of all colors of all political parties, races, nationalities, and countries - I was with three Austrialians, 2 Canadians, a guy from Kansas, and two other Americans from elsewhere, and I'm originally from Detroit, okay? - we weren't thinking about any of that. Okay? We were helping each other. We were concerned about one another. And in that moment we were just human beings. And we were just all fighting for the same thing. And to come back out of that situation and see everybody fighting, over what? It's ridiculous. To me it's just utterly ridiculous. Because honestly I know for a fact if any of you were in the same situation and you had to survive and some Democrat or Republican was standing next to you, ... you'd drop all that stuff. So please just try to be a little bit nicer to one another.

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All that is needed for people to get along is for them to get to know each other as people instead of as stereotypes portrayed by the news media, politicians, and other "cultural leaders".

https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/5448...0-ku-klux-klan-members-to-give-up-their-robes

How One Man Convinced 200 Ku Klux Klan Members To Give Up Their Robes August 20, 2017

If you spend five minutes with your worst enemy — it doesn't have to be about race, it could be about anything...you will find that you both have something in common. As you build upon those commonalities, you're forming a relationship and as you build about that relationship, you're forming a friendship. That's what would happen. I didn't convert anybody. They saw the light and converted themselves. ​

Former NPR CEO goes on a road trip through flyover country: http://nypost.com/2017/10/21/the-other-half-of-america-that-the-liberal-media-doesnt-cover/

For an entire year, I embedded myself with the other side, standing in pit row at a NASCAR race, hanging out at Tea Party meetings and sitting in on Steve Bannon’s radio show. I found an America far different from the one depicted in the press and imagined by presidents (“cling to guns or religion”) and presidential candidates (“basket of deplorables”) alike.

I spent many Sundays in evangelical churches and hung out with 15,000 evangelical youth at the Urbana conference. I wasn’t sure what to expect among thousands of college-age evangelicals, but I certainly didn’t expect the intense discussion of racial equity and refugee issues — how to help them, not how to keep them out — but that is what I got.

... ​

The vast majority of prejudice is due only to ignorance and people being lied to. Actual experience of the truth of what people are really like is enough to dissolve the illusions of difference.