Last month, Malka and I jumped on a couple of civity opportunities to be in conversation with people different from us.
We both participated in the StoryCorps Connect250 invitation to record a one-on-one conversation with another American about who we are and what we hope for the nation, looking 50 years ahead. These recordings will become part of the collection of the Library of Congress and are intended to provide a snapshot-in-time of the U.S. in 2026. Between the two of us, Malka and I engaged in five different conversations with five different people. StoryCorps founder Dave Isay describes C250 as “Hey America Meet America!” and tells us he was thrilled with the response – 100,000 + minutes of recording from thousands of interviews in all 50 states.
I also was part of a Roundtable, co-sponsored by AllSides and Newsweek, in which a randomly-selected small group (there were five of us) from across the country contemplated the meaning of and our experiences with the American Dream.
All of these conversations were virtual, connecting people from various places across the country. They brought together people who had never met before. The organizers left the conversations up to us, though they provided a suggested format and questions.
And the conversations were all real conversations in which real we shared our real experiences and perspectives – not to reach any kind of agreement or consensus but simply to listen and understand.
Here are a few highlights:
- Sharing cherished memories of now-departed members of our families in response to a question asking about our “favorite relative” (with my Connect250 partner from Nashville).
- Getting into a meaningful conversation about how we think about death (with my Connect250 partner in Santa Fe).
- Challenging the traditional financial-success frame of the American Dream with my Roundtable partners and resonating instead with the idea of people having the “freedom to flourish.” One person said, “The American Dream needs a reset.”
- Comparing notes on our relationship with our parents – and how easy (or difficult) it was to rebel against them (with Malka’s Connect250 partner who left her family’s home in an all-Mormon Salt Lake City suburb for New York’s Upper West Side).
And, of course, I won’t forget the sudden end to one conversation when my partner’s cat came into the house with a live snake. These were definitely real-life and real-time!
In reflecting on these civity conversations, a theme emerged.
Most immediately, Malka and I were struck by how the various participants envisioned the future for the U.S. that they were drawn to and hoped for. People talked about “care” and “caring.” They used the words “empathy” and “healing.”
What the people Malka and I listened to meant by care seemed to reach both broader and deeper than an individual person caring for an aged parent, a failing spouse, or a disabled sibling. In invoking a more caring future, they seemed to be gesturing toward a culture of care – a culture in which we collectively care about other people. A relational, civity culture.
Stepping back, what we saw was people leaning into the invitation to envision, to imagine, to open up different vistas for our shared future.
In recent Civity newsletters, I wrote about how an increasingly important aspect of Civity’s work is countering pervasive stories that tell us that Us-versus-Them division is the immutable human condition, that we are inevitably tribal. I wrote about how we do have agency; We can in fact choose to create a culture that is more “We All Belong,” more civity.
Imagining that possibility is to take the first step toward a future rooted in empathy, in caring, in civity.As the poet Langston Hughes wrote, “I dream a world…”