This past August, I made three posters. I can’t call them protest posters, because instead of the usual signs you see at protest rallies that shout at passers-by to think this way about an issue, my signs all said, “Please come talk to me.”
I announced on the Facebook page for our town that I was going to be on the tiny town common on Monday afternoons with my signs.

Weather permitting, I am planning to be on the common from 4 – 5 PM next Monday. It will be an invitation to talk to each other. My signs say things like, “Please come talk to me if you support current immigration policies.” “We all need to support Black Lives Matter. Please come talk to me if you disagree.” “Please come talk to me if you think we have enough gun control in this country.”  I hope you’ll come if you feel as if progressives aren’t willing to talk about the issues, or won’t listen to other points of view, or don’t value the concerns of others. I do listen, and I do value respectful communication. I believe the most important thing we can be doing right now is talking to one another, trying to understand one another.

And then, because what I was doing scared the heck out of people who love me, I went to the police. I gave them a copy of my Facebook post, I gave them the days and times I would be on the common, and asked if they would swing by from time to time to make sure I was OK.

Why would a seemingly sane old woman do this? My friends, my tribe, the people I hang out with at home and at church, the ones I go to lunch with and have over for dinner: we have been having the same conversations over and over about these urgent issues. Some people tout solutions that they feel belonged at the top of the list for each situation. Otherwise, there has been little variation in the conversations that have surrounded me for the past three years.

My stomach squirmed each time I heard the same spin on the news, over and over. I wanted fresh conversation, ideas that made me think or that put the issues into more bendable frames of reference. It had become too easy to see political conservatives as racists or unfeeling couch potatoes glued to FOX TV. I wanted to engage with conservatives as human beings rather than as a label.

The very first week, it was 90 degrees in the shade. Not a breath of air. A woman who lived in the center of town walked up to the common. “I came to support you,” she said. “This is such a great idea!” She carried one of my signs while I carried another. The sun burned down as we walked and talked.

A woman wearing a red MAGA hat drove up. “I just want to say thank you for doing this,” she said. When I asked if she had time to talk for a few minutes, she sat down on a bench under a shady tree and stayed for the remainder of the hour. We talked about immigration, where we each get our news and “facts,” the idea of a meritocracy, and the poor quality of our political representatives.

She did this despite being on her way home from a 10-hour work day, despite the three children and husband at home. I marveled that someone would be that generous with her time and herself.

Both of us felt that the conversation was worth it. We hugged at the end and agreed to work on finding time to meet now and then over breakfast at the corner restaurant.

The next Monday was brutally hot and humid. I walked and walked around the common, waving signs at the cars going through the intersection, to no avail. The most action that day came from a couple of guys who left the tavern up the block every few minutes to come out of the air-conditioned coolness, have a smoke and gawk at me. I was glad the day didn’t disintegrate into a meaningless conversation with a couple of drunks.

Meanwhile, on the Facebook page for our town, close to 50 people had been following my posts and writing comments back and forth in support of what I was doing. Only once did someone question my motives, wondering if I was up to “political proselytizing.” When that happened, the woman I had talked to the first week was among those coming to my defense, noting that she felt I had listened to her.

I made it clear in my own continuing posts that I was not doing this to talk about Trump or any other high-profile politician or personality. I was there to talk about the issues.

A panel truck pulled up beside the common the next Monday. Two fellows on their way home at the end of a weary day of working came over. I’d been walking with the Black Lives Matter sign at that point. One fellow said, “I saw you holding this sign a couple of weeks ago and promised myself I’d stop to chat if I saw it again.”

Although it seemed as if this gentleman was left of center on several issues, the Black Lives Matter topic bothered him. He had seen what proved to be (I researched it afterward, as I had told him I would) a politically managed and edited video that made it look as if the black protesters were calling for violence against police officers. “I watch a lot of You Tube,” he said.

These guys also stayed and talked for the whole hour, tired as they were from work and as much as they wanted to get home. Because the conversation was amicable, we meandered into related topics such as systemic poverty and discrimination, gun control and term limits for politicians.

There is something immensely powerful about being listened to. There is something joyful in finding that you can carry on a reasonable conversation with someone whose take on the issues of the day is vastly different from your own.

After they left, I picked up one of my posters and started walking back to my car. When I turned around, there was the woman who owned the little grocery store across from the common. She held out a cold bottle of water, beads of condensation dripping down the sides. “I see you’re still out here!” she said. That water tasted so good.

She stayed to chat for a bit. “I don’t have too much to say about those things,” she said, meaning the issues on my posters. She did want me to know she had been keeping an eye on me. If anyone had become obnoxious, I knew without asking that she would have called 911 in a heartbeat.

Despite feeling that she hadn’t much to say, she had been thinking about immigration. She had grown up on a farm, she said; worked ten long, hard hours a day as a youngster, out in the heat. Now she can’t find teens who know what work is, know what it means to do a job, never mind understanding and appreciating that the work she is offering in her store as cashier is a far sight easier than work used to be when she was young.

The difficulties of finding good part-time help make her remember all the immigrant farm hands she worked with growing up. It makes her wish she had a few immigrants in the application pool these days. She knows how hard they work, knows their reliability.

I got rained out the next week. When the following Monday rolled around, it was finally cool out, a very pretty late summer day. I was walking with my gun control poster for just a few minutes, when a man made a u-turn right in front of me and pulled up next to the common.

“I saw your poster a couple of weeks ago,” he said, “and I promised myself that if I saw it again, I would stop to talk.” Isn’t that interesting? People needed to give the potential conversation some thought, and get up the courage to do this. One of the most natural things in the world, talking to each other, has become a challenge, a cause for bravery.

We went and sat on the same shady bench where each of the other conversations had taken place. Again we talked for the whole hour. Must be something about that bench!

This gentleman has police and military experience, owns guns and enjoys using them for target practice up at the local gun club. He talked about the fear and misinformation many people seem to have about guns. He has thought about gun control a lot – including doing research on the white males who are committing mass shootings to learn what their backgrounds were.

When you get into tough topics with someone who stands on the opposite side of the divide, little offshoots of conversation happen, like tendrils on a plant. In this conversation about gun control, we also talked about boys living in fatherless homes and children who need more emotional support than we are currently offering in schools. We talked about attending gay weddings. In my conversation about Black Lives Matter, we had talked about police brutality and what it was like losing a friend in a mass shooting and having friends who went to support the Standing Rock protest.

I have stopped going to the common on Mondays so that I could take stock of all that happened there. It was an immensely rich experience. It will take time and reflection to articulate all that I learned. But I can tell you three things that will stay with me.

First, I am not alone in longing for opportunities to have good conversations about the important issues of our day. People are thirsty for this kind of meaningful interaction. If we all could become fabulous listeners, so that every conversation about the issues is respectful of one another, this world would be a better place.

Too often, such conversations become like ping-pong matches. You toss your “facts” at me and I toss my “facts” back at you. Conversation needs to be more thoughtful and considerate than that.

Second, people are growing more and more aware of the pitfalls of social media, and more aware of the bias in news sources. Some try to compensate by reading from as many news feeds as they can, across the wide range of opinions. Some see social media as the cause of the political divide, with its short bites of provocative comments and images intended to arouse strong pro or anti feelings. People are beginning to look for more meaningful interaction than social media can provide.

Third, people are wonderfully multi-dimensional. Way back in some high school course on personal growth, we learned that we keep learning and growing throughout life; that as a result, we become more complex individuals with many components to our personality. However, we all seem to be more prone to putting people in categories and boxes as we age. It becomes habitual and way too easy to “see” someone only as the label we have assigned to them.

So it is with “conservatives,” and “liberals,” and “progressives.” The people I met are all living rich, full lives with many things to occupy their time, their hearts and their minds. Were they my neighbors, we would love having each other over for supper. If I see them on the street, I will smile and give them a hug.

We all wanted more of what we’d just created.