Zack Sherzad
Walter Yost
Walk A Mile In My Shoes Editor’s Note: Inside Sacramento asked Zack Sherzad and Walter Yost, two local writers with differing political perspectives, to meet and swap media diets for several weeks. We didn’t know if they would learn anything or even get along. Their stories describe what happened. Thank you to Braver Angels for the original idea of media swaps.
LET’S AVOID LABELS, BUT THE BERET CAN STAY BY ZACK SHERZAD When someone asks if I am a rightwing conservative Republican or a left-wing liberal Democrat, I shudder. There’s no useful answer. In the best case, the response produces a friend who parrots your beliefs. In the worst case, you are ridiculed and dismissed. When I learned I would be paired with a Democrat in a journalistic experiment where we swap news diets in the spirit of bipartisanship, I was nervous. I don’t like the idea of one’s life experience being boiled down to a single word. It leaves too much to the imagination. In the current political climate, imagination can be uncharitable. Consider my first impression of Walter. I was told he was “far left.” When we arranged to meet in a coffee shop, he told me I would know him by his beret. Really? My imagination began to whirl. Was he an artist, communist or revolutionary? All three? We hadn’t even met and already I’d turned him into a caricature. We exchanged news sources—his more traditional print journalism vs. my techie websites, podcasts, YouTube videos and Reddit threads—and met
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three times to discuss how the exchange was affecting us. Each time I was pleased by the nuance of our conversations. We hedged our assertions with considerate devil’s advocacy. We let each other speak. The trick, we concluded, was to avoid focusing on labels. There may be times when labels can be useful, but they are shortcuts—excuses not to do the hard work of learning what someone really believes, and how those thoughts developed. It’s easy to hate a label. Liberal. Conservative. Democrat. Republican. These are abstract concepts, not people. They depend more on the perspective of the perceiver than the perceived. It’s not so easy to hate the articulate individual standing before you, drinking an iced coffee and sharing events that shaped his politics. When I was in high school, I joined a mission trip. We drove to Tijuana to build a house for a Mexican family. We arrived at dusk and passed through the city as the sun was setting. I saw people living under tarps, sleeping on bare dirt and drinking filthy water. As a teenager
from a small U.S. town, I never imagined such a degree of poverty existed. We spent a week pouring a foundation and assembling a simple one-room house out of tarpaper and wood. When we finished we gave the family a broom as a housewarming gift. It was a cheap broom from a dollar store, but the mother cried and hugged the broom to her chest. Her 7-year-old son said, “Now we will not have to sleep in the street with the cockroaches.” When I graduated from college, I joined the Peace Corps and spent two years teaching English in Tanzania. Most of my students were desperately poor. Their parents were subsistence farmers who lived at a standard many Americans would not believe possible. Their houses were made of sticks and mud, with roofs thatched from dried palm fronds. They collected rainwater to drink and labored to grow cassava in the jungle. None of this experience is communicated by the word “Republican.” When I read Walter’s media, it felt as if millions of reasonable Republicans nationwide were being
judged by the behavior of outliers. It seemed that all good faith had been drained from the conversation. The situation is similar for right-leaning media coverage of Democrats. It would be easy to blame the media. But I don’t like that narrative. Americans are not sheep. If something thrives, it’s because an audience exists. It’s quicker and easier to label, condemn and ignore the opposition than to practice the intellectual discipline, rigorous open-mindedness and radical empathy required for true centrism. But the media meet us where we are—and right now many Americans choose the easy path of prejudice. Today I consider Walter a close friend. I respect him for his beliefs and have faith that his viewpoints make sense in the narrative of his experience. From now on, when someone says the word “Democrat,” I’ll think about Walter’s many good qualities. If we approach the opposition in good faith, we might find we aren’t as opposed as we think. Zack Sherzad can be reached at zacksherzad@gmail.com.
