compromise is not a dirty word

by Guest Blogger Andrea Phillips

So here’s the thing: I support Hillary. I support her, I am all-in, I fucking love her and I love that she was my Senator and I love about 90% of the policies she plans to put into place. She is for raising minimum wages. She is for background checks for guns. She is for LGBTQ equality. She is for abortion rights. hillary2 She is for campaign finance reform. She is for paid family leave. She is for universal health care. She is for clean energy and disability benefits and a better, more compassionate world.

She is a woman who has literally made it her life’s work to improve the lives of women. She has evolved and grown to care about issues around sexuality and people of color, and from where I sit, changing your mind when you get new information is a strength, not a weakness.

Most of all, I love her because she knows how to compromise. This is the thing about a better world: you can’t will it into place single-handedly. You can’t drag the half our nation that are Republicans kicking and screaming into a socialist paradise. It’s exactly as unfair to them as creating a Christian theocracy would be to us. Compromise. That means sometimes you won’t get your progressive way, yes. But I’ll take incremental change over trench warfare while the world burns any day of the week.

I don’t think she’s a saint nor is she some progressive avatar here to lead us to a utopia. She is a human being making human choices in a problematic environment. But I hate that I even have to say that. And I hate that I can’t even say how much I fucking love her as a candidate because of the abuse I’m expecting to get over it, not even from trolls out for lulz, but from my own family. I feel like I don’t even get to have an opinion in public. This is the climate Bernie made.

Folks, “I’m voting for Jill Stein because the other candidate isn’t progressive enough” is exactly the kind of thinking that got Canada almost a decade of Harper. Go on, ask them how that went.

I’ll be waiting here.

Andrea Phillips is an award-winning transmedia writer, game designer and author. She has worked on projects such as iOS fitness games Zombies, Run! and The Walk, The Maester’s Path for HBO’s Game of Thrones, human rights game America 2049, and the independent commercial ARG Perplex City. Her projects have variously won the Prix Jeunesse Interactivity Prize, a Broadband Digital award, a Canadian Screen Award, a BIMA, the Origins Vanguard Innovation Award, and others. Her book A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytellin g is used to teach digital storytelling at universities around the world.

You can find Andrea on Twitter at @andrhia. I mean, if you like that sort of thing.

Compromising and negotiating is how mature adults handle problems. They work together to solve their problems.

It’s so sad that our society has so many people who cannot understand this, especially when it comes to politics.

I’m not talking about compromising your ethics. But politics? Law? My marriage? Life in general?

I’ve learned, as I’ve aged and become wiser, that I’d rather work with the other side and get 50% of what I want than be stubborn and get 0%.

There are gray areas in the world. Not everything is black and white. Compromise is needed to get things done.

A lot of the arguments I get into with people over politics seem to do with this refusal to compromise; with people who see things only in black and white. (And this includes many on the left as well.)

In some ways, it is like those who strongly believe their religion to the point where there can be no compromise because that means you’re helping evil prevail. Abortion is the best example I can think of there. I am more than willing to compromise on this issue — I agree that there should be restrictions based on medical science. I am willing to change my position as medical science changes. However, those who think that a collection of cells is a life from the moment of conception will accept no compromise. They will not budge, so how can we work together to solve this problem?

The gun extremists also think that it is impossible to have any compromise because it’s a violation of their civil liberties as guaranteed by the Constitution. They feel that any attempt to prevent felons, terrorists or the insane from having guns is as much of a violation of their rights as throwing someone in jail without giving them a hearing. There is no middle ground with these people.

Libertarians are some of the worst in this regard. They hate all government (except of course the government they like; they are hypocrites, but uncompromising ones). If you say “You know, people shouldn’t discriminate” they argue that it is their right to discriminate and if you don’t let them kick gays out of their business then you are violating their freedom! (They of course, could care less about the freedom of anyone else.)

Seriously, how do you deal with these people? Well, you can’t. You can lead someone to compromise, but you can’t make them think.

And you know what I’ve found? So many of these people are unhappy with life. They lack empathy for anyone else’s view. They’re angry all the time because they are constantly fighting battles they can’t win because of their inability to compromise.

I don’t always get my way. The people I can deal with also don’t always get their way.

And that’s just fine.