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Exercise on Framing: Refugees fleeing Central America at the Border Wall

The border wall is a hot topic right now in the news. Exercise:

(1) What are the policy choices? What are all the different frames you can think of — the different ways to focus on the story — that you hear?

Important: people can usually take either side within a frame:

Take relief => the frame is that taxes are an affliction. "No new taxes" and "The rich should pay more" => both positions treat taxes like an affliction, opposite positions within the same frame.

(2) [usually easy] Which of these frames is more focused on the values you want to emphasize?

Techniques: 

Facts Do Work — Bricks or Artillery?

When you have political conversations, how do you use facts? Do you lob them at opponents like artillery? And then your opponent digs a deeper trench to avoid the blast? If you use facts like artillery, your opponent will dig trenches and build bunkers: facts work in the story you use them. Or do you architect a building of shared values, and build it by placing facts like bricks, building up the story of your values? A story people are welcome to explore if they are curious — not a battle for you to win and them to lose. Facts work there too.