Gee LH. If I post my sincere agreement with you then I demonstrate the I am not one of those prejudiced types! Yeah. None of us HERE are like that.

What shapes our biases? Is it the opinions of significant others? How many of the Republicans had Republican parents? Democrats with Democrats for parents. How may were born Catholic? Atheists? Are your preconceptions shaped by past experience? After you've been bitten a few times by dogs do you develop a sort of innate fear of dogs? Does your way of dealing with conflicts always work? Never works? Did it work in the past but not now?

The point is, we all build a world of assumptions about us. Some are accurate. Some may not be accurate but they work for us. They are needed in order to survive the world and deal with dangers of all sorts. In this way we don't have to re-invent the wheel every time we need to roll. You only have to be burned once to understand a particular aspect of fire. Thus our minds are shaped by our sitz em leben ( life situation ), our cultural (or counter-culture, as the case may be), our experiences, our fears and our loves.

When we find agreement with another and establish common ground then we are communicating. But what about those with whom we disagree? What points are there in common that serve as a launching pad for communication or do we just blow them off? Ignore or disregard them or their ideas? On what basis do you evaluate what they say? Do you run it through your filters of political idealism or religious purity? Categorize until you have everything pigeon-holed?

It is tough to really listen to someone else and really hear what they are saying. It takes real effort and you have to lower your own bulwark of defenses and step inside the other person's world to begin to understand. Some of us do this professionally and that is a good thing but at the end of the work day you turn it off. You shouldn't bring work home from the office! Right? Never give out your home phone number! Right? Were you really there for them or there for them for the money? The last bulwark?

How about even in knowing yourself? Have you ever let down your defenses against the things you fear about yourself? How well do you really know yourself?   Into the dark and the nightmare. I, the subject and the object?

Ah, well, maybe it's my own story I am looking at after all. We can never truly stand inside the mind of another, can we? Really? I think we can, as much as another person makes her or his mind available to us. The history of human thought suggest that we can do that. We pass along ideas and inventions, share common experience via a common language. We define terms, stipulate, argue and so on but the key thing is that we KEEP TALKING! Keep on trying to understand one another. When the talking stops, the killing begins.