Walk a Few More Blocks Together

I liked this post at Time by Peter T. Coleman. Here’s the setup:

Early this summer, I emailed a neighbor of mine, whom we’ll call David, and asked him to go for a walk with me in the park. Although we had lived in the same building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for more than a decade, we had previously only shared pleasantries with one another in the elevator. But this neighbor’s political views diametrically opposed my own. Given the dire, toxic, runaway path to civil war our nation is currently on, and as a professed conflict mediator, bipartisan bridge builder, and depolarization pundit, I felt it incumbent on me to reach out and try my best to walk my talk. My spouse also talked me into doing it.

I thought my decades of training as a conflict resolution scholar and mediator of difficult moral disputes prepared me for just such encounters. But I spent most of the hour before our date in distress in my bathroom.

When I greeted David in front of our building, he also appeared ill-at-ease. Nevertheless, we headed toward the park for a brief jaunt, anxiety in tow.

On our way, we chit-chatted about our families, and then I explained to him my reason for reaching out. I said that I was increasingly worried about the political divisions in our country and the growing odds of extreme political violence. I was doing my utmost to better understand different perspectives on the situation. He replied, “You mean, you don’t know any Republicans you can talk to.” When I hesitated, he added, “Any Republicans that like Trump, that is.”

“That’s about right,” I admitted.

Nominally, the piece is about how we can avoid a civil war in the United States.

I don’t think we’re going to have a civil war in the sense of pitched battles of organized troops. I do think that things are going to become increasingly stressful and, to crib a word from an earlier post, chaotic. More like Mogadishu than Gettysburg.

My prescription would be a little different than Mr. Coleman’s. I’d recommend three steps:

• Listen more and talk less.
• Respect each other.
• Look for points of agreement.

One more suggestion from basic optimization theory. Pick one stressor and reduce it. It might not be the most significant stressor. Picking the easiest might be the most worthwhile. Each reduction in stress will make the next step easier. We’ve been doing the opposite for the last 50 years.