Tag: political engagement

A liberal and a Tea Party Patriot enter into a conversation. What happens next? A screaming match? A bitter Twitter feud? 
With the proper parameters, they just might find common ground. 
Six years ago, Joan Blades, a progressive political activist and co-founder of Moveon.org, and Mark Meckler, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, sat in Blades’ living room. Instead of hurling insults at each other, they discovered that they shared similar ideas — so much so that they ended up launching the Coalition for Public Safety, i.e. the largest bipartisan group working to reform the justice system. 
That meeting was part of a series that Blades co-founded in 2010 called Living Room Conversations. Today, Living Room Conversations is a California-based nonprofit that works to support civil discourse in spaces that have traditionally played host to such conversations: our living rooms.
The living room has traditionally been a place where people could gather and discuss politics and culture. With Living Room Conversations, the actual physical location is irrelevant — a “living room” might very well mean a coffee shop, park or library. And the purpose of these conversations is not to solve a problem but to try and humanize one another via thoughtful dialogue.
“The goal is to have a rich conversation where the intent is to understand and to listen, and not necessarily change somebody’s mind but to find a connection with them as a human being,” Mary Gaylord, the managing partner of Living Room Conversations, told NationSwell.  
In our ever-more-connected world, many people feel that society is actually growing more disconnected, as people turn to screens instead of engaging in face-to-face interactions. Sherry Turkle, director of MIT’s Initiative on Technology and Self, found that people who spend more time connecting online are more isolated in their everyday lives than people who are largely unplugged. Turkle found that life online often leads to emotional disconnection, mental fatigue and loneliness. In this way, Living Room Conversations functions as a corrective to the above, providing a chance for people to connect in real life.
Living Room Conversations isn’t the first group to support such civic dialogue. Ron Gross, who joined a recent Living Room Conversation, founded Conversations New York, a local group that hosts free public gatherings. Democracy Cafe, National Conversation Project and Better Angels all have a similar goal to spark conversations and find common ground among diverse groups.
“Our country is in a crisis right now with the disconnection and the discord and the really toxic sort of way that people are lining up on sides and feeling really disconnected,” Gaylord said.
A group of six people, mostly strangers to one another, joined a Living Room Conversation on a recent Tuesday evening at the Project for Public Spaces, a nonprofit dedicated to building community in public spheres. The group sat around a coffee table with hummus, cookies and sparkling water, and launched into a dialogue centered on the topic “The America We Want to Be.”
“The world we live in is incredibly stressed and incredibly disconnected, even though it’s incredibly connected — digitally — but that doesn’t mean connected human-wise,” said Jay Williams, the sales and partnership head at a mediation company. That disconnection is what led him to Living Room Conversations, he said. 
Each Living Room Conversation uses a conversation guide that anyone can find on the nonprofit’s open-source site. Living Room Conversations offers more than 100 guides on topics like gun violence, healthcare, tribalism and forgiveness. The nonprofit suggests finding a group of four to seven people with different backgrounds, religious beliefs, political views or perspectives to engage in a conversation.
Each meeting starts with “general value” questions, such as, “What sense of purpose guides your life?” (It’s Living Room Conversation’s version of an ice-breaker.) “These core values, it doesn’t matter where you fall in a political or racial spectrum, those are things that almost everybody cares about,” Gaylord said.
Williams said creating a positive future, one where his two children could freely travel to any part of the world, guides his life. For Chandler Simmons, a video editor, he looks to honesty and authenticity. Meg Walker, the senior vice president at Project for Public Spaces, wants to leave the world a better place than how she found it — a sentiment that the entire group agreed with.
The discussion then turned to harder-hitting questions like, how does your ideal modern America reflect its founding aspirations and past? Or what role, if any, do you experience our history playing in America today? 
The group also discussed the country’s founding rhetoric around the concept of “the pursuit of happiness.” A pursuit that Morey Bean, a community architect, felt that many should reassess. “You keep hearing that there’s the pursuit of happiness, and my thing is that maybe we should stop pursuing and know that we’ve got this abundance [of happiness] right here and right now.”
Chandler Simmons, a video editor, agreed, adding that at some point, someone will suffer for the gluttony of another. “Without any awareness of where the limit is, then what can we expect? Someone at some point in some part of the planet is going to suffer if we’re pursuing happiness nonstop.”