Opening Salvo // Keep on Climbing
Americans should recommit to one another, our country, and the world
by Heather Shayne Blakeslee
EXCERPT //
I recently had the opportunity to go to my own 30-year high school reunion. You might be able to locate Bloomsburg on the map of Pennsylvania on the cover if you know where to look along the east fork of the Susquehanna River.
We did not talk about politics. We didn’t debate vaccine policy. No one even mentioned the pandemic, come to think of it. We joked around and checked in on each other’s families and reminisced at the VFW Hall. It’s hard to think about the fact that on a different day, we might be on opposite sides of the barricades, each believing we have the moral high ground.
But even if we did meet under those circumstances, I would not be able to unsee my classmates as the people they are. Trust builds up among people in small towns, and it will never completely dissipate, no matter the distance. But what do we do when we don’t have that basis to start from?
One idea, promoted by the Ideos Institute, is to come to tricky conversations armed with empathy. Julia Galef, another helpful voice on this topic, asks us to explore a similar option: interpreting the sometimes ugly realities of life as a catalyst for discovery—what she calls “scout mindset”—instead of locking into our ideology and aggressively defending it. Soldiers, keep on warrin’. It never ends.
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