All human beings have the capacity for compassion: We have an innate capacity for compassion, though not always the knowledge of how to access it.
~ Miki Kashtan, Founder of the Nonviolent Global Liberation Community (I’m joining her in two weeks in Santa Cruz to learn more about her work firsthand)
I really like Representative Elijah Cummings. I’ve heard a number of the House Oversight Committee hearing that he chairs. He inspires me with his way of speaking and his very apparent concern for the well-being of children, our “democracy” and of his fellow congresspeople (Here he is responding to the President’s tweets about the “Squad” and here he is speaking from his heart at the end of the Cohen hearings).
I am not enjoying the President’s tweets about Representative Cummings that started this past weekend and are continuing. I’ve been using my Compassionate (Nonviolent) Communication skills to translate my “enemy images” of Trump so I decided to give Trump giraffe ears. This allows him to express himself differently to give you all an idea of what might be happening for him underneath his tweets. To help him be heard, I also created a Twitter Giraffe. The imagined twitter conversation between the two is shown below. It begins with the President’s first actual tweet followed by “Giraffe Donald Trump” translating that tweet into giraffe language with an Observation, Feelings, Needs, and a Request…
Here is a link to the video of the portion of the hearing I think Trump is reacting to.
What do you think? Far-fetched? Unrealistic? Probably. Yet part of creating a new world is envisioning what it might look like. Guessing at the President’s needs helps me see him as human. This allows me to resist what he is doing with love — going “high” as Michelle Obama said — rather than falling into the vicious cycle of judgment and blame! Humanizing those with whom we disagree puts us on the path to a world where everyone Communicates with Heart. 
