Gide, humans. Do you ever feel that the pace of change is a little faster than you might like,

that the direction of the change is a little more chaotic than you might like? Do you ever feel

somewhat destabilized? And maybe even that if you articulate your concerns or your frustrations or your

fears, there will always be someone right there to jump

down your throat and tell you that that's an inappropriate thing to say, or that you might

have just devalued someone else's feelings by expressing your yearning for things that are

comfortable to you. In the conversations around immigration and refugees and what we should do about the fact that we

live in a globalized world on a single planet where all of us are just striving to get by and

help one another and create a better future, that that is inherently destabilizing, that that

is inherently discombobulating. And we can have this conversation alone in the privacy of our own brains,

fearful of triggering tripwires that are going to anger other people

or of saying things that we're not supposed to say or of coming across the wrong way

or of not seeming like we're allies.

We can hide in our own heads jumping at shadows.

Or we can take a maximally expansive idea of what conversation is supposed to be.

And we can articulate ourselves and try to not judge each other and try to muddle our way

through all of this.

Because the surest way to inspire a backlash, a bigoted, small,

petty-minded, insular, parochial backlash against the kind of globalization that I'm saying

is something we should embrace. The surest way to provoke that backlash is to stymie conversation and make

people feel too afraid to be able to articulate their legitimate concerns, even if those concerns

tiptoe up towards demographic or racial or ethnic or religious fault lines. We need to have

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