If we are not concerned about the future of American democracy — the survival of this democracy — in this most perverse of election years, then we are not paying the attention we need to.
One path back to American optimism and realism is finding ways to talk to each other, to stop the debilitating and dehumanizing ways we have come to communicate about our shared civic life.
Growing Community Media is bringing two men to River Forest next week in a return of our Conversations series. Two Dads Defending Democracy is a model of how two people with strongly divergent political views, which they often shared in sniping fashion on cable news and insults via social media, took their conversation offline.
Joe Walsh, once a flamethrowing Tea Party congressman from the far west suburbs, and Fred Guttenberg, a gun safety advocate whose daughter was murdered in the Parkland High School mass shooting, actually started talking. What they discovered was common ground on protecting our fragile democracy this year. And as the talk turned into a genuine friendship, they also found ways they can see progress even on an issue like gun safety where they had profound differences.
I’m inviting you to join us, April 9, at Dominican University in River Forest for a moderated conversation between Guttenberg and Walsh. The price of admission is $15. That’s a discount for our readers. Here’s the link: bit.ly/GCMTwoDads. The discount code is FF15.
A month ago, I took a random phone call from an unknown number. Turns out it was Shane from Tennessee. It did not start well. He was, inexplicably to me, very upset about a candidate for the 1st District seat on the county board. She was a radical leftist, he said, and Chicago was being overrun by migrants and “what the hell is going on up there?!”
I anticipated the call would end quickly with mutual shouting and a complete reinforcement of our powerfully held views. Instead, Shane listened while I said the candidate was a little left of me but an entirely reasonable woman with deep community roots. And he listened when I told him that all of our reporting on the West Side and in Oak Park about migrants made clear these people mostly wanted work so they could support themselves, that they came thousands of dangerous miles for the same reasons all immigrants come to America.
And I listened while he told me his family story of hard work and limited opportunity, his success as a recruiter in technology, and that he is part Native American and how proud he is of that heritage.
Thirty minutes later we closed the conversation sharing stories about our daughters and wishing each other well.
I’ve never had a conversation like that before. I expect I’m not alone.
Our divisions are profound. But finding ways to talk to each other is vital. I hope you’ll be there on Tuesday when the Two Dads show us how it’s done.
Dan Haley
Publisher
Growing Community Media