Beautiful Trouble

I feel like one of the most effective principles right now in creating a persuasive argument for those with a divergent perspective is the principal of "bring the issue home". This page on the website begins with the quote, “If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow.” - Rachel Carson.  I feel like this is really important right now because people are just ignoring facts. People call anything that is contrary to their beliefs "fake news" or "alternative truth" and are able to get away with it. It is clear that we can’t fight with just facts anymore. We have to appeal to people’s emotions, and making it personal for them is one way we can do this.

This reminds me of an article I read earlier in the year, “The Simple Psychological Trick to Political Persuasion - Conservatives are more likely to support issues like immigration and Obamacare if the message is “morally reframed” to suit their values.” 
      https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/02/the-simple-psychological-trick-to-political-persuasion/515181/

      Conservatives and liberals have different ideals, but when we speak our opponents' language, rather than insisting on our own, we may actually see results. Some of these ideals are,  “harm and fairness (e.g. benevolence, nurturance, equality, social justice),” and for conservatives, “group loyalty, authority, and purity (e.g., patriotism, traditionalism, strictness, religious sanctity).” By reframing our issue in the context of the ideals of our opponent we can speak to them with their own language and things that are important to them. This is one way we can "bring the issue home", and it doesn't require a lot of creativity to do. 

Insisting on the moral high ground, or that you are right and others are wrong, isn't a very inclusive stance or effective tactic, in my opinion. Though the first principle listed on the "Beautiful Trouble" website is "anger works best when you have the moral high ground", I would argue that this is no longer an effective strategy. People can no longer agree on what is "moral". We can't even all agree that bombing children is bad (as evidenced by the Presidential Debates last year.)! We can't all agree that nazi's are bad! We have to target our audience where it will affect them. 

Right now I'm not certain what our/my goal is in this project, so I can't determine a tactic that would be best utilized. If anything looking through the website just created infinitely more questions for me, but illuminated things I didn't consider before so now I have a better course for sorting things out, through the tools suggested on the website. Some of these questions were:

      1. Is our overall goal/strategy to show that the embargo should be ended? To improve relations between the US & Cuba? To show that the Cuban people are human too? To help the people of Cuba?2. Do we need to define our target before we proceed?

     3. What do I want?