I am usually a person that tries to understand the other person’s point of view and to put myself into his or her position to be able to reproduce their train of thought. But sometimes I catch myself by doing what Wendy described in the exercise for today’s blogs, I just shut down and stop listening. Sometimes, I just shut down because I think that my oponents views are so unrealistic or not relevant but sometimes I tend to shut down because I already focus on a contra argument in my head. That I stop listening because I am thinking about my own counter arguments happened to me a lot more since I am in the United States because I have still trouble to speak fluently and correctly so I tend to verbalize the sentences and arguments in my head before I speak them out loud. This causes me to lose focus on what my conversation partner has to say.
One time, I heared Jorge W. Bush defending himself because of the intervetion into the Iraq and I just stopped listening during one sentence because I already had manifested my own point of view about this issue. I could not stand him and his excuses with the weapons of mass destructions that were never found. Even after five years he still used this argument and never said in public that one of the main reasons was that the United States had to intervent to maintain their oil demand. It was like “an elephant in the room” but nobody talked about it. When Bush gave his speech that were my only thoughts and I got angry listening to him so I just stopped listening. I was already thinking about 100 counter arguments. I still think that the military intervention from the United States into the Iraq was a big mistake but I think that the common citizen is not able to understand all the reasons for that war and that the “oil issue” was just one of them. Today, I think that I should have given him another chance to defend himself because I could have probably found out another reason, which might be not so obvious, why this war is taking place.