The title of this piece may be misleading and it actually is meant to be. Me and a couple of my friends coined this term "coffee and abortion" to refer to a time when we would have a coffee over a conversation about serious social issues. Being a guy, my age, I do have a group of friends who are into gaming. Most of our conversations will lean towards gaming.
However, many moons ago, one of my gaming friends posted on Facebook about the issue of abortion which I happened to disagree with. As with practically every single comment thread online, the discussion then involved other people and became nasty and there was no real resolution to it. Online anonymity is the enemy of intellectual honesty. My friend, the original poster, then politely asked me to drop it just to take the high road. I couldn't agree more with him at the time. Online discussions can be very fruitless and frustrating which is how I decided to ask my friends if they'd be open to have a gathering where instead of talking about gaming, we'd instead talk about these more serious issues.
Since that time, our list of topics had grown and we still haven't been able to gather enough people for our first gathering. The topic need not be about abortion. Among the topics we might take up are homosexual marriage, Duterte's war on drugs, transgender issues, and charter change. These friends of mine actually do have strong opinions on these matters and a face to face discussion most definitely encourages dialogue and a forced civility.
While we still hadn't had our first formal "Coffee and Abortion" gathering, we somewhat got an informal kind last night. My friend Faith, asked me when we'll have Coffee and Abortion and the people in our table looked at us weird and so I explained to them the origin of the term and just like that, people were giving their opinion on the matter. The discussion was very lively and though no minds were changed still, the end effect was that everyone took away someone else's point of view and took it respectfully.
I most definitely got something out of the conversation which is all I needed to know that they took something away from it as well. I guess my next post would be a set set of guidelines about how people can have their own Coffee and Abortion discussions. Here's what I think rule number 1 should be:
"You're not here to change minds. You're here to express your ideas and learn other people's ideas."
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