Let's Talk, America!

by Vicki Robin

Let’s Talk America is using the Conversation Café Process and Agreements to open up a meeting ground in America where people with political differences can speak, listen and learn without having to agree, change or bite their tongues. Many of you have participated as hosts or guests during the election year – and many more are needed post November 2. We’ve been in a civil war of words. America is as polarized as it’s been in a century. Friends, neighbors and even families aren’t talking. Tensions and stress are high – and holding. Like during the post-911 period, post November 2 Americans will need to make sense together of what just happened to us as people and a nation. After 911 the number of Seattle Conversation Cafés grew from 3 in the Summer to 24 in January – and we anticipate that LTA conversations (200 so far nationwide) will be an essential part of people’s way to transform our grief, anger, confusion and fear to hope, trust and engagement in shaping the future.

LTA is the leading edge of the “mending edge” of politics. Our American spirit of innovation and independence tend to cut the ties that bind us as communities and citizens – and LTA Conversation Cafés re-knit that web. We have discovered that Americans have a yearning to bridge differences, to talk about “taboo” politics in a civil manner - just to understand themselves, our democracy and the times we are living through. We have discovered that we may be making verbal progress on racism and religious prejudice, but we still feel very free to be foul mouthed and insulting politically – indeed, if you are not they call you apathetic, undecided, disengaged. We’ve discovered that people in the middle aren’t blasé about democracy. They care and think deeply but don’t find that divisive, “my way or the highway” polarization expresses their views or their dreams for our country.

Just as reading and writing are essential skills of democracy, conversational literacy is crucial. Democracy is in fact a conversation - an innovation that permits non violent resolution of conflict in an increasingly diverse world. It’s like a marriage full of love, passion and conflict - if we can’t talk, we can’t get on with the big American Experiment in freedom.

LTA is encouraging everyone to hold post election community conversations on the third Thursday, November 18, in groups as small as 3 or as large as a Grange Hall. It’s far enough from November 2 that much of the first flush of grieving and gloating – responding to who won – will be spent but close enough that people will still be raw, perplexed and needing to talk.

In my community of Vashon Island in Puget Sound, we are holding a Community Conversation in the High School Cafeteria called “Now What?” Here’s what I’ve put on the flyers...

“By November 3, one of the most polarized elections in America history will be over. But it won’t be “over” for many of us. Some will be celebrating. Some will be in shock and upset. All of us, though, will have been through a 6-month ordeal – practically a civil war… of words. All of us will be asking, “Now what?””

We are using two simple questions:
“How was this election year for you?”
“How are you feeling about the outcome?”

I believe keeping things at the story and feeling level will allow folks to process – and to mend internally and with one another. There will be plenty of space for our minds and opinions, but few public spaces for our deeper, meaning making selves.

I also believe that CC hosts in the hundreds or thousands will be essential in this “post civil war of words reconstruction period.” We need folks who can provide simple public spaces where curiosity and respect reign, and people can sit down again at tables with their political ‘enemies’ and soften their hearts, open their minds and become “We the People” again. After all, that’s who the Constitution says created this nation. Whoever is President, his sole authority comes from the ongoing “consent of the governed.”

If you would like to host an LTA conversation post election, please sign up at www.letstalkamerica.org – and let’s learn together how to bind the wounds of our country after this punishing ordeal. I would be thrilled as I host my event on Vashon to know that many of you are also gathering folks to make meaning of this transition time.