Final Hours of a marathon set of talks some arguments were technical over how to account for carbon emissions which proved difficult they were put off to next year other disputes were more fundamental over commitments for deeper cuts in emissions as demanded by the latest science but resisted by some of the biggest polluters to as things stand there's a range of promises by many countries to take action on climate change but even if they're fulfilled they would still lead to dangerous temperatures in the coming decades the top Democrat in the u.s. Senate Chuck Schumer is calling for senior figures and the trumpet ministration to be summoned as witnesses at the president's impeachment trial Peter both reports in a letter to the leader of the Senate Republicans Mitch McConnell took Schumer lays out a framework for the impeachment trial which he says should start on Generally the 6th the leading Democrat says past and present senior White House figures who have not given evidence so far in the impeachment inquiry should be subpoenaed to appear at the trial include the Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and a former national security advisor John Bolton. The u.s. Envoy to North Korea Stephen began has said the door remains open to a peace deal despite Pyongyang is hostile tone Mr Begin who's visiting South Korea said the u.s. Had no deadline but instead had a goal to fulfill the commitment President Trump and the North Korean leader Kim Jong un made during their historic summit we are for you aware of the strong potential for North Korea to conduct a major provocation in the days ahead to say the least such an action will be most unhelpful in achieving a lasting peace on the Korean peninsula but it doesn't have to be this way. It is not yet too late we in the North Koreans have with in our hands the ability to choose a better path Mr Biggins comments come shortly after Pyongyang says it has conducted another successful rocket engine test. Scientists in Indonesia finally been able to examine rock the body on the sea floor around the volcanic island of that crack a turbo that collapsed a year ago part of the island slid into the ocean after an eruption triggering a tsunami researchers using sewer equipment observed colossal pieces of rock some 1000 meters high the data will help to update tsunami models world news from the b.b.c. . Prosecutors in Mexico City found at least 50 bodies buried in mass graves at a farm outside the western city of quite a lot of cholera forensic experts are working at the site to try to identify all the victims they've been able to establish the identities of 13 people so far all of them are on Mexico's list of missing people the authorities in the state of school say the victims are likely to have been killed by criminal gangs fighting for control of drug routes. Anti-government protesters in the Lebanese capital Beirut have again clashed with this. Security forces Gary Barlow reports to get to the Capitol where police took aim with water cannon protesters flooding into the city's central square the unrest follows survey clashes on Saturday in which dozens were injured 2 months of violence has seen Lebanese society unite in anger about the ailing economy and chronic unemployment forcing the prime minister and senior officials to resign the process to replace the cabinet starts later today but for those on the streets the reforms on tyrannical enough they want to overthrow the entire political system a study published in The Lancet medical journal Warner's an increasing number of low income countries are facing both under nutrition and obesity similar timi Asli sometimes even in the same family the research sponsored by the World Health Organization blames a lack of access to affordable and healthy food and the rise of process and fast food. New Zealand has held a minute's silence to mark the exact moment a week ago when a deadly volcanic eruption to place on flight Island 18 people are known to have died in the explosion including 2 whose bodies have not yet been recovered 26 survivors are in hospitals in both New Zealand and Australia some of them still in a critical condition b.b.c. News. It's to the best of our knowledge I mean strain champs. Can be a force for good. Was in the airport in Charlotte North Carolina on a flight to somewhere and I remember walking around and watching the t.v. Monitors and seeing the news activist Brendan Steinhauser right now it says well you just shot that that works Intel is on c n b c live on the floor of the Chicago Board of Mercantile Exchange the filter with this whole thing that they hear and he's talking to traders and there was this moment where he kind of had this righteous indignation this moral outrage this is for somebody you people want to take your neighbors who are against this say as world Ok pay the bill for a survey if. Everyone around me was glued to the television screens body sitting there with anger with outrage with fear President are you listening and they were wondering how did we get into this mess and how are we going to get out of it you want it they got to have a Chicago Tea Party in July you caplets I want to show up the lake Michigan out of this are organized. What was interesting was that Rick was very upset and he was sort of channeling this energy in this anger and outrage in a very specific place but it was also happening outside it was happening at that airport in Charlotte North Carolina. It was happening down in Fort Myers. It was happening in a suburb of Kansas City one of the early protest. The idea of channeling that anger channeling that energy was very powerful. We were overwhelmed in the numbers that we were seeing across the country leading up to this massive rally in d.c. On September 12th I remember as the main organizer of this event you know hoping and praying that we would get 250000 people to show up that was really the number that I was hoping for and I remember at 5 am it was dark and I walked on to the platform there at Freedom Plaza and there was conservatives ever held at the capital. Activists like Brendan Hughes anger to spark protests and build movements for social change. Propelled Donald Trump to the White House is changing political alignments all over Europe and we're going to talk about that this hour but 1st let's think about the kind of anger we're all the most familiar with ordinary every day. So I was at an airport recently waiting in the security line and there was an agent who's just been Cretu to sleep rude to everyone barking orders snapping at people and acting like we were all stupid everybody on line was fuming but you know what do you do with that. I think I muttered that she was a jerk and then treated myself to an extra large coffee but psychologist Lisa Feldman baronet would say I missed an opportunity Lisa runs a lab where she studies emotions and she says that if you pay attention every day anger can be a source of wisdom she tells Rayman tonic are why Buddhism teaches for example that anger is a form of ignorance and if you're in your car for example someone cuts you off you might feel really angry and this anger is born essentially of not understanding the driver's perspective so maybe the driver is rushing a sick child who's hurt to the hospital or maybe the driver is late for a particularly important meeting this is another way that anger can be instructive you can use anger as a signal to ask yourself what is the other person's perspective and if you do this it allows you to use anger as a cue really as a form of wisdom that allows you then to to dissolve it that's anger is a form of wisdom that's a fact yes so I think sometimes cultivating anger can be useful because it reminds you as a cue to try to take the perspective of another person sometimes anger is useful because it reminds you that you care deeply about something and gives you the sense that you're part of a group but I would think that there's also kind of a danger with that especially in a political context in that it could lead to maybe feelings of contempt and unwillingness to compromise or talk with you know your political adversaries absolutely every emotion can be used for good or ill you know every emotion can be even happiness can be a form of wisdom or potential pitfall for your behavior I think. In anger especially these days in this political moment anger can feel empowering particularly when you're around like minded people. You feel validated that energizes you to act the problem of course is that one thing that binds people together in anger is having a common out group you know a common group who you all disagree with and so how would one cultivate constructive anger without feeding into that division between in-group outgroup Well I think again the thing to do is to use your anger as a cue to take somebody else's perspective and be curious about their perspective to remind yourself to stop and think and listen what you're saying it would seem kind of counter-intuitive I mean I would think that a lot of people you know myself included think of anger is kind of this corrosive emotion something that stands in the way of rational thinking but it sounds like what you're saying is that that line between emotion and reason is getting blurred it's always been a fiction to some extent that we use in Western civilization scientists have believed really since the beginning of research into the brain that there are parts of the brain for emotion parts of the brain for rationality and there in some kind of grand battle so you know your mind is a battleground this is a cherished narrative but it actually doesn't reflect the structure of the brain at all there are no parts of the brain for thinking versus feeling your brain is not a battleground between rationality and emotionality call that's remarkable up until this point I thought that when we feel angry or when we feel some kind of emotion there's a specific portion of the brain that just like lights up with activity you're saying that's not the case so what what happens when I feel angry what's really happening in your brain. Is that it's structured metabolically to predict So for example right now it may seem to you as if you're listening and reacting to every single word that comes out of my mouth but in fact your brain is predicting the sounds it's going to hear based on the statistical regularities of what's occurring right now so so in the same way when you're in traffic. When the highway and someone starts to move into your lane even before you consciously see that person moving into your lane your brain will start to predict what's going to happen next it'll start to prepare a variety of actions and then if the car moves you will react in a way that feels very reactive to you because you weren't aware of the predictive part of it so if a car is moving into my lane to cut me off you're saying it like the feeling of anger that's brewing in me isn't me reacting to the car it's just my brain predicting how to react based on previous models That's right so the way that I would break it down is to say something like this just isn't a large company has a financial office that keeps track of revenues and expenditures for multiple budgets you also have a financial office for your body for all the systems in your body that's your brain so for example if you go from a sitting position to a standing position your brain has to anticipate that and change your your blood pressure so that oxygen can make it to your brain so that you don't faint and it does this predictively And so what it's doing is when it perceives a threat a potential threat even a threat in a moral sense it is adjusting the internal systems of your body which gives you this very strong intense feeling which you make sense of as say a moral outrage for example and what should one do when they feel that threat or is there anything they can do to kind of assuage the yeah there there is this is the most exciting aspect of the work that we do and that other researchers are doing as well with respect to managing your own emotions so currently the kinds of strategies that we offer people are things that they can do in the moment but that's actually really hard to do. You when you're feeling intense unpleasantness that's distressing to you it's really hard for you to dial that down in the moment you know sometimes not possible to do so there are things that you can do though before those moments that will decrease the likelihood that you'll feel moral outrage for example one thing you can do is learn new emotion words words are linked to concepts that your brain uses effortlessly as the gases that are your basis for your emotions so try to learn the distinction for example between irritation frustration and outright rage How does that lead to positive outcomes the more words you use that you learn the more facile you get with using them the better your brain is at tailoring your actions to the specifics of the situation the ability to construct emotions with fine grained distinctions really helps your brain control your actions it also actually helps your brain just work more effectively be more metabolically efficient the thing I'm wondering though is I can recognize anger on someone else's face you know even when they want to admit it or even if they're not aware of it and so I wonder how do you how do you know though and how do you know when you're recognizing anger and they don't admit it how do you know you're right chirp I mean they're frowning they may have a scowl on their face I mean their faces like a telltale giveaway right absolutely not a face does not speak for itself when it comes to emotion yeah there's really fabulous research on this so to you it may seem like you look at someone's face they're scowling and that means they're angry but I can tell you for example my husband makes a classic stereotype skall face when he's concentrating really hard you do many things in anger you can shout in anger scowl in anger smile in anger laugh in the face of anger and you also smile. Well at times when you're not angry and you can also scowl a times when you're not angry so what your brain is doing is it's seeing a scowl and making sense of that what that means in the context of everything else that's going on in the moment and you're causing me to question all of my personal interactions with other people up to this points. One of the things for the points that I make is that the our sense of certainty about our own perceptions in the world is not evidence that we're right and one of the best things that we can do in order to get along and get ahead in life frankly is to be curious about other people and really set aside the notion that you know you know consider the fact that what to you feels like recognition is just a guess and it might be a really well informed guess but it you also might be wrong and you might really We're talking about anger in this hour and there's a lot of it right now all over the world terror attacks in Europe hate crimes in the u.s. Populace leaders everywhere spouting nationalist slogans that just a few years ago would have been unthinkable. Writer punkish Mishra traces the roots of contemporary political rage back to a kind of surprising source the 18th century Enlightenment state falls and caught up with him to talk about his new book The Age of anger you have written a very timely book here with the election of Donald Trump the Bracks vote all the populist movement springing up around Europe but you traced the politics of anger way back to the Enlightenment thinkers of the 18th century why do we need to know this history to understand our current political moment I do think we need to reacquaint cells with that history with this particular history and really examine the ideals of the modern world as they were formulated the ideals of liberty equality of Commerce of trade the pursuit of wealth of intellectual sophistication and then this was the period that really kind of booted the church out of the governing values of our society and Marketplace values came in as well certainly absolutely in this is the crucial change and I think we really absolutely have to understand what happened there was that we moved away from older forms of hierarchy and authority and embarked upon this extraordinary leader radical adventure of using human reason to build society and to define its laws and to define the rules of political community this was the great adventure that the embarked upon back then so if we are examining political which is pretty much universal today then we have to go back to that moment when we stop . To liberate ourselves from the church from traditional religion from the authority of divinely ordained kings and that kind of thing well let's go back to the beginning of the Enlightenment when this dream of modern rational state was 1st articulated by 2 French philosophers who were rivals of all terror and Rousseau they had diametrically opposed ideas about what a good society should be and you suggest that to a certain extent we're still stuck in their arguments Absolutely and I think you know those differences are absolutely crucial I feel to understanding where we are today because in many ways the kind of map onto our contemporary divisions between the Metropolitan elites and the angry disaffected masses who blame the elites for their suffering and for their plight. While there I mean I think you know someone who advocates free trade who's all for calm was who wants free speech doesn't have much time for the masses doesn't really have much time for people sense the belonging to social classes inferior than his but very extremely ambitious and then you have Rousseau who is from Geneva an outsider in Paris who feels slighted who feels humiliated by this sort of glamorous world of the Perris in elites and he thinks that these new ideas of state of wealth or vanity competitive ness going to leave human beings extremely unhappy and they're going to cause deep internal conflicts which turns out that he was not entirely wrong and these were contemporaries Voltaire and Rousseau and and they hated each other didn't. They did it other full kinds of reasons I mean there was a you know great class divide and temperamentally there were very very different. Bruce of course had a lot of what we would identified today as psychological problems he was a very peculiar man in many ways while there was a man of the world you know a great lover of wealth the great lover of powerful people Rousseau hated all that he disliked rich people he avoided that company in fact so very different in all kinds of ways and also most importantly different in their views of the Good Life of what one what the good life consists of well I'm curious about your take on this new era that we have the politics of anger or you could call it the politics of resentment because my sense is that even though you're clearly not sympathetic to save the proxy vote or the election of Donald Trump least I don't think you are my sense is that you have some sympathy for this politics of resentment I think I think that's a fair summary of my attitudes and I think one reason one is compelled in a way to feeling sympathy for those positions you know even though I'm not at all sympathetic to the black city is and needless to say nor do I love Donald Trump but I can understand why people voted for him or why people voted for breakfast I do think we have to make an effort to understand the rage and is there and frustration that drove people into making these unwise political choices and without that act of sympathetic understanding I think we'll simply. These divisions between the aloof metropolitan technocratic elites and the masses who feel that these elites are simply scorning them and these are the pullout it is that we see today in the United States and and many other countries today in kind of almost a kind of civil war or low intensity civil war you know there is a different explanation for the rise of Trump and the people supported and. These emerging nationalist movements in Europe that the right wing movements and that's the reaction to fundamentalist Islam to the threat of terrorism in Europe in the Middle East you know they are there to protect us against those forces Well I think that was a catastrophic mistake that many of us made after $911.00 we were obsessed with Islam people made anti careers out of portraying Islam as a religion that seems to offer a special legitimacy to 2 acts of violence and Well there certainly are still people who say well Absolutely absolutely I mean you know it's a whole industrial out there but you know intellectually it's a dead end result has a long history which is nothing to do with religion it has to do with specific social and economic pressures which become intolerable let's certain times and what we have seen in recent years is not just terrorism in Muslim countries but also in this countries among the Sikh populations we have seen that the Hindu majority population of India so it is certainly not particular to any religious community I've just come back from spending a month in Myanmar read with this monks are leading at think cleansing mobs in the how does one explain that does Buddhism sanction violence the answer is No of course not and you take the argument even further in sort of the kind of the radical thing that you say is there's actually a lot of similarity between some of these fundamentalist religious groups and the nationalist groups you see popping up in the u.s. And Europe to some degree they're both reacting against sort of this move towards modernism and none of them like it absolutely I mean I think you know the the argument of the book is that we have to look beyond binary oppositions Islam was is the West liberalism worse is Islam more the West versus the east we have to really start thinking of the world. As constituted by sameness and so if you're a white nationalist in the United States or in Scandinavia if you're a unemployed Muslim graduate in Egypt or a poorly paid witness live in India what unites all these experiences are of shared feeling of powerlessness of humiliation of exclusion this is what we should be focusing on so to come back to the promise of the Enlightenment I mean this was supposed to deliver humanity the modern world into this new age that was going to be more rational be more humanistic now going to sort of follow the old outdated rules of the church but a lot of that promise seems unfulfilled and I guess the question is Where does that leave us this is where I feel it's imperative to examine the ideals of the Enlightenment more closely I mean you know we have allowed ourselves to be dazzled by them we have started worshipping them as a kind of substitute god what do you think we're worshipping I think simply saying that progress is irreversible is inevitable. On this out of equality and liberty and prosperity and that more and more people are going to be benefiting this is a kind of fantasy that specially in the last 3 decades has become very very intoxicating for many people but can we actually realize them without running huge risks and of course we haven't even talked about the great threat to the environment the fact that the ideas of prosperity that have been realized by a tiny minority of Europeans and Americans are they really fulfill a bill for the hundreds of millions billions literally of Indians and Chinese. Who also want them. And of course globalization was supposed to lift all boats right I mean it was supposed to make everyone the process is you know this is what I'm saying that I you know we are looking at Ottilie fantastical projects you know we've moved into a realm of total fantasy I mean these are just empty metaphors you know globalization is going to lift all boats there's going to be trickle down and you know the benefits of economic growth will eventually be available to all while the anger today so much of it arises from the fact that these promises were false and you know there was no way these promises were going to be fulfilled so you know here we are in a kind of impasse really when so much of what we believed in being exposed. Is the author of age of anger a history of the present possum talked with him. In 1998 in San Francisco a terrible crime took place Harvey Milk one of the country's 1st openly gay elected officials was assassinated. Cleve Jones was a young activist at the time and Harvey's protege is also the guy who later came up with the aids quilt and what he remembers is how the gay community channeled anger and grief into a night to never forget. You know. I had never seen a dead body and. To walk in there and see him to see what the bullets had. It was. The most horrifying experience of my life I remember you know sitting in his office while they bundled up the bodies and I just kept thinking it's over it's over. And then he won the sun went down. a reporter poked me in my apartment. My 1st reaction was to vomit I just ran into the bathroom and was very very sick to my stomach and by the time I got out of the bathroom and pulled myself together my apartment was already filled with people who were just in very frightening and also very right. It was very interesting what happened the following day because we had Harvey's birthday party and 50000 people showed up on Castro Street ready to fight and standing on the stage on Castro Street I watched as tens of thousands of people poured into and filled the entire 2 block area and I was just sensing the crowd and trying to imagine what I needed to say to people to keep them focused on Harvey and to avoid further violence. And I said something to the effect that last night we had shown the world that there has been some came out of San Francisco are angry and on the move and that tonight we're going to show them what we're building out of that anger and that movement and strong community I. My favorite memory of that whole night is when it was over. And the crowd was gone the street was still shut down and the cops stayed away. And they were just small groups of people standing in the street hugging each other and. Someone who had maybe too much to Trink started screaming about Harvey and all these people went. And embraced this man and calmed him and then began to sing happy birthday to you. It was at least that's my favorite memory of the thing it says. If I never wanted to really know what solidarity feels like that sweater chalk up to be in that crowd of so many thousands and thousands of total strangers and to feel such safety of such security and such a connection to each other you know this is part of who gay people are or who we were then at least that one night we could. Burn police cars in the next night we could gather and dance in the street to Sylvester and. Sing happy birthday to Harvey Milk and have a beer and make out. And I think everyone. Had a sense that they were part of making history was. Cleve Jones is the author of When We rise my life in the movement there was a mini series based on it that aired on a.b.c. And the archival footage we heard is from the Pacifica Radio Archives the scene was . A man strained champs it's to the best of our knowledge from Wisconsin Public Radio is in. The. . We're talking about anger in this hour and there's a lot of vitriol out there these days partisan sniping on social media screaming matches on cable news not to mention the early morning tweet starless from certain elected officials frankly it's exhausting also infuriating blood boiling and maddening So why can't we just let it go. Maybe because we as a nation are addicted to anger at least that's what science fiction writer and astrophysicist David Brin believes in fact he wrote an open letter to addiction researchers and psychologists asking them to investigate America's epidemic of self-righteous indignation the big picture on addiction is very very simple we have an ability to be addicted because it helps us to survive we get addicted to our children and that helps us to be decent parents and put in the work we get addicted to music and joyful things what heroin and other drugs do is they hijack this reward system and the worst most destructive habit that releases the same chemicals endorphins and careful in this dopamine is self righteous indignation let me explain this because I don't I think most people would not think of self-righteous indignation as releasing a pile of neurochemicals that would find addictive will think about it so many other mental states can be addictive this is absolutely proved why not a mental state that has helped people throughout thousands of years to be strong in the face of anger if you are self righteously indignant you have the power and will to pick up that spirit to pick up that sword to pick up that legal brief and go into combat self righteousness and indignation aren't all bad sometimes they're called for the people who marched with Martin Luther King for example the people who fought back against Hitler but the problem is that whenever you enter a mental state that's addictive you have a tendency to go back to it and then back to it and then back to it again and if I ask your listeners to look into a mirror and be honest. Whether or not they've ever been really really indignant Of course everybody if they're honest would raise their hands but then the 2nd question is didn't it feel good didn't it feel good to be so righteous to be civil right to know that you're among the lonely few who know what's going on and fighting against the oppressors anybody left or right in our country would have to admit yeah. But the thing I could don't get is why you think that's actually physically addictive for pleasure Will people really enjoy being angry now and after this interview is over please look in a mirror and try to remember some of the times when you were right show us when you knew you were right and and and authority figures were so wrong David I'm afraid that's every day yes and it there's of the luxury of us n'est to it. So this is a little scary because you're talking about neuro chemical pathways that we've turned into super highways how are we supposed to change that well I think that it's terribly important that we recognize that there are powers on the left and the right and all over the spectrum that want us afraid because then we're more easily manipulated and a fearful mind is more resistant to facts and we've been seeing this in our culture where where it's really hard to refute anything if the clinging to your side's point of view is boosted by not only self-righteousness but fear. Is going to say that you know the addiction analogy only goes so far I mean for instance while self-righteousness maybe can be irritating it's not like it's killing people like an open. Lloyd epidemic so is this dangerous Well tell that to the poor sick gentleman who was shot dead in his driveway by someone who indignantly and self righteously thought he was an enemy No no I'm not claiming that self-righteousness is directly responsible for as much death as heroine but I think it's responsible for far more damage in that it destroys our ability to see the commonalities in each other to recognize that the indignant and self righteous person at the other end of the spectrum is responding to the same mythologies the same suspicion of authority the same caveman fears all these things that come together in a mishmash that has destroyed the ability of the one republic that ever existed on the face of the earth that was based on logic that was almost Vulcan in its belief that we can negotiate compare facts and come up with reasonable compromise solutions that's what our parents in the greatest generation did it in when they overcame depression and and Hitler and contain communism and built fantastic industries and a mix of government and private enterprise but you could also use would be afraid ashamed of us right now for being so we logical My guess I think surely there is some benefits to anger as you said the civil rights movement wouldn't have happened without self-righteous indignation protests over climate change wouldn't have happened so much that's good and so much social change and social justice happens our begins with self-righteous indignation I absolutely agree we have to look at all of the things as the anthropologists are hurt he has pointed out we should neither ignore. What we were for a 1000000 years cave dwellers mammoth hunters and then living in feudalism we should neither ignore our background nor let it limit us and it would be ignoring our background to ignore the fact that many many of our steps of progress were fueled by indignation we should have this as one of our 6 mental suites mental states that we can get into when something is very wrong . But when it reaches the point where it's a drug that you can't say no to that you can't walk away from and take a vacation from that you can't calm down and sit down with people on the other side what they did and what's the dividing line for you and what's the difference between indignation as moral virtue and indignation as a drug when you can in the course of your actions calm down enough to put indignation aside then you know it's less an addiction and more a choice when you notice that it's preventing you from listening to someone sincere who has a suggestion that doesn't fit your stereotypes if it's preventing you from pragmatically mapping out how to achieve your goals and it's counterproductive. What if you go back to thinking of trying to balance substitute one pleasure for another because you began by talking about this kind of indignation as addictive and addictive because there is something very pleasurable about it so what's another kind of pleasure that you could substitute Well absolutely but we do have examples Franklin Roosevelt John f. Kennedy and especially Ronald Reagan were able to tap into not just indignation against injustice but also hope and there's so much to be hopeful about in our world it's completely loony that we should be in this state of Wrath when the last 70 years of the American pax for all of our mistakes have been the greatest era in the history of humanity. And we should be bragging about that because only by bragging about that can we prevent some forces from saying everything we've done is a mistake let's try the old ways the old feudalist ways the old ways of thumping power. You know we done some things that are good and we should brag about those in between the screams of denunciation. Science fiction writer David Brin. So throughout this hour we've been talking about anger and the role it can play in achieving social change yes anger can separate us into partisan camps but it can also inspire is to work together to achieve amazing things writer Michael Eric Dyson knows this firsthand and his latest book here is we cannot stop reads as a call to action to many Americans he told Charles Monroe King why he wrote it you wrote this for a white America obviously it's in the title of the book Why well because I think when white people you know hear about race they think black people and I say let's talk about white people see our uncomfortable it is that's how are comfortable it is for us but you never think about that you never have to pull back the layers and think about what it means to be white and so I wanted to to address white brothers and sisters because if they don't change a nothing happening man black people can get converted and think about this in different ways it makes no difference unless white brothers do to and sisters to to she said if less they change I guess I should say I'm sorry unless we change I'm white what do you expect I want the conversation the start I want to conversion factor to happen I want people's minds open I want them to think seriously about to get angry get upset get mad get resentful but mode and think about what this might mean you know for you to write a book like this when I look through this I saw a lot of grief was this really painful for you to write extremely painful for me to write it was painful because I had to dig beneath the objectivity of my scholarly craft and vocation and come up with a personal voice something deep. Inside of me partly my success has to do with keeping those feelings at bay draining a clinical distance between myself and that anger that my you know wrathfully articulated so in order for me to be successful in white America I have to suppress that anger but now writing this book I have to unleash the heartbreak the pain the suffering the grief I wanted to communicate that you know it's interesting you know for me you know I think that our country's never properly dealt with the legacy of slavery to Jim Crow and I think mass incarceration is a major problem of race in our country but I don't know what to do next what should I do what should we do what people do with the similar emotions Yeah it's a great question I think to speak out for white people to say something about it it's not just a black and brown problem of white folks get is enraged about that is about animals and weeping and they should cry tears on television and weep over animals but my god stepping over the bodies of black and brown people to do so it's not an either or thing you can be concerned about animals and concerned about human beings but many black people think that white folk of a certain inclination care more about their animals than they do about their fellow human beings who are Black and Brown do you do you think white people aren't empathetic to what's happening to you well when they are not because. It doesn't happen to them look that's most human beings that's not just people who are you know stuff happens to you you you own a red Corvette your you notice Corvettes more remember as it was said the opposite of love is not hate but indifference and so black lives matter says we matter stop thinking that we don't matter so yeah there is a lack of empathy for sure you know it's interesting I'm reading your book and I'm struck again now hearing you talk the answer seems so clear hearing you talk it's diversity I need to make sure. Or that I go out of my way to create a lifestyle where I'm around people who are black just to understand what's happening I need we all need to be eating food together you know I mean that's what we do we doing Yeah it sounds simple but it's so true man and when you meet other people when you when you have a black friend and or many black friends and you see how they're treated and you know tame I did the same thing right get treated like that so you can readily answer for us as people of color we're going to commission you and deputize you right now to go back to a white America you could tell the truth in a way that many white brothers and sisters seem not to know I was thinking when I think about diversity I think about people I know that are white they're well intentioned if I can use that and they have this fear and the different fear that you have in our big fear is that we get evolve in the black church or we're going to evolve somewhere civically and we make a mistake and we make a mistake right we're considered racist and we're scared to death like you calling me a racist right now for something I said just destroy me so we're so afraid of it and so fragile and so and secure in who we are that were afraid to engage because refer to the call that what you would do with that yeah it's a great point and it's honest and I can understand that honestly I can understand as a man I'm trying to be a feminist but dang i mess up and the lady is going to call me while you're still a sexist Well you know what do they suffer more than my hurt feelings I think so is right words to my hurt feelings I think so but when you win people over and they say you're sincere even when you make a mistake they're going to say you know what but that person has a good heart they're really trying to do the right thing they're really here in there swinging with us and you get different kind of brownie points literally different kind of. Getting brownie points this is a great day or. So you know it's a different situation and yeah there's a risk but the reward is greater and that I think outweighs whatever risk one my. I take in order to render that service I got to ask you a question I'm sitting last night reading your book and by chance my wife has a copy it's a book version of Langston Hughes is let America be America again and I never read it I pick it up and I read it it's amazing it's beautiful it's righteous has a very similar message and it struck me it was written 80 years ago and I'm like what is really changed how do you how do you keep hope alive yeah yeah well talk to Jesse Jackson the author of that phrase and that's one way I do it. Keep hope alive. But you know you said something important there it's hope it's not optimism optimism is a shallow virtue it's predicated upon reading the tea leaves and seeing if we're going to have a positive versus a negative outcome and what is the likelihood but hope is something against the obvious against the evident the revealed world in juxtaposition to an imagined world you know I question many elements of the revealed religion and how people practice it because I got a lot of arguments with that at the end of the day my religion is love I don't care if you claim you to be a Christian like me you're a believer like me but if you believe in some of his madness of homophobia and sexism and racism I'm not down with you and if you claim to be an atheist but you're practicing love and doing the right thing then that's my religion so I know that doesn't sit well with a lot of people but that's what I believe. Michael Eric Dyson he was talking with Charles Munro cane about his new book Tears we cannot stop a sermon to white America. That's it for this hour but there is more in our podcast if you like this show do us a favor leave us a review on i Tunes or stitcher that helps other people find us to the best of our knowledge comes to you from Madison Wisconsin and the studios of Wisconsin Public Radio. Produced this hour with help from Charles Monroe came to mark records and. It comes from Steve Mullen From walk west music. Is our technical director Steve Paulson is our executive producer and I Man strand champs. Paul was tell executive director j. P.r. Thanks so much for your support during the past year in a cluttered world of media choices j p r service of the community stands out it stands out because local independent journalism is harder to find yet more important than ever stands out because real fact based news is essential to our democracy it stands out because we celebrate the new ones behind every story and pursue diverse voices to celebrate our diverse human experience it stands out thanks to you as you consider making your own country store his ations a positively impact their community we hope you'll support it's easy to do at work we have big plans for the coming year and we always remember that you make our work possible. This is the news and information service of southern Oregon University's Jefferson Public Radio 12 30 am k s j k talent at 9 30 am. Also heard in the 2.3 f.m. News of the region the nation and the world. 2 it's 3 am in London good morning and welcome to News Day on the b.b.c. World Service without. Too little too late was the criticism of a compromise deal finally reached of the u.n. Climate talks largest polluters and decided to basically side with the vested interests namely the hospital and the story while you have the planet literally on fire Time is definitely not in our sights study is born the poor countries are struggling to deal with the bases under-nutrition happening at the same time also Britain's parliament prepares to reconvene with a stronger prime minister backed up by a large majority of the members of parliament this isn't a united party this is a party that has got through a very difficult political period because of its one vision for the BRICs if. The person is from the place is called. Hello this is a b.b.c. News if you know MacDonald The u.s. Envoy to North Korea Stephen beacon this is the door remains open to a peace deal despite Pyongyang is hostile a negative tune Mr Begin who's visiting South Korea dismissed an end of year deadline given by the North for the u.s. To make concessions saying Washington had no deadline only a here's more from the B.B.C.'s Laura Baker since April Kim Jong un has set a deadline for the end of the year the United States to come up with a deal that is acceptable to Pyongyang now by that we're not quite sure what they mean but it is assume they want a whole raft of sanctions lifted and they would also like security guarantees Now whether that's in the form all perhaps the complete and to any exercises joint military exercises between South Korea and the United States or whether it's the kind of removal of any u.s. Assets here in the potential we're not quite sure. President Trump's efforts to court the North Korean leader Kim Jong un of so far failed to persuade him to abandon his nuclear weapons program the top Democrat in the u.s. Senate Chuck Schumer is calling for senior figures in the trumpet administration to be summoned as witnesses at the president's impeachment trial Peter Bush reports in a letter to the leader of the Senate Republicans Mitch McConnell took Schumer lays out a framework for the impeachment trial which he says should start on Generally the 6th the leading Democrat says past and present senior White House figures who have not given evidence so far in the impeachment inquiry should be subpoenaed to appear at the trial they include the Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and the former national security advisor John Bolton New Zealanders held a minute's silence to mark the exact moment a week ago when a deadly volcanic eruption to place on flight Island 18 people mainly from New Zealand and Australia are known to have died in the explosion including 2 whose bodies have not been recovered film or so has more flags across Australia where several of the victims were from are also being flown at half mast.