Contentment vs fact

For lunch on Sunday, I made "Israeli Salad" (and the accompanying cocktail) from Zahav.  This was a deliberate choice on a number of levels: 1) it's summer, and tomatoes and cucumbers are in season, and delicious and 2) Saturday was mostly spent running around and all I could really manage to eat was potato chips, rice snacks, and a bowl of cereal, so I was feeling kind of carb-heavy.

Now, #2 is entirely silly.  Eating vegetables for lunch was kind of an act of "cleansing" which doesn't work.  The idea that some foods rid your body of other foods is entirely unscientific, except for the possible exception of insoluble fiber.  I know this is a nonsense idea.  But psychologically, it feels satisfying to eat vegetables to make up for eating lots of carbs.

And I am wondering if this psychological sense of contentment, of something that feels satisfying in the face of facts, is partly what is going on in this election season.  I mean, when majorities of Trump's supporters don't even believe half of what he is saying, facts are obviously not what is carrying the day.  It feels good (for them) to hear someone saying what he is saying.  It feels scary to know that black people, brown people, non-English-speaking people, and women are gaining power in society, power that had previously been reserved for white, English-native men.  Even if they have never actually seen these effects, they know they're out there.  It's not the actual disenfranchisement as much as the fear of it.

I'm not really sure what can be done about it, though.  In pastoral care and counseling classes, we are taught that feelings are neither right nor wrong, and that one of the first steps to dialogue is validating the other person's feelings, regardless of whether the other party thinks they are "valid" or "fair."  But when those feelings and emotions lead to real harm, to hatred and violence, validating them may not be the way to begin.  Where do you go when you've validated vitriolic hatred?  Not even that the hatred is valid, but that the person feeling it has good reason to.  That is what people are doing when they point to the hollowing of the middle class, wage stagnation, and the disappearance of jobs that don't demand a college education.  But for all the analysis of the validation, no solution is offered to get the people who are hating to stop hating.  Value systems aren't easily changed after generations.

And even educated, informed people can act contrary to fact and their own knowledge.