What's the Wednesday, April sixteenth, we are dropping our third story in this week of citizen ing, this how to Citizens story sprint, and this one is about division allegedly. So I was talking with John Alexander. We have like a group chat going with me, him, Elizabeth and Shira to run this little sprint, this project, and he hit me with a note that I want to weave into
the setup for this story. And he's like, look, there is this nationalization of the story of division, and we have these big old.
Headlines about how divided we are.
But when you zoom in at any local level, in any community, you find people who trying.
To live together, trying to work it out. And that's what this story is today.
I mean, we are obviously divided, but I remember some of you may remember Tim Phillips episode of How the Citizen audio podcast where he talks about these consistent studies that we think we're more divided than we are. We think the quote unquote other sides hates us more than they do, and that's a perception challenge.
It's also a manipulation.
Experience that there is benefit to someone from making us think that we're not aligned here. So part of what we need to do is drop down a level, get literally closer to the ground, closer to where we live, locals, where it's at.
And I mean I remember when I was even doing.
Campaigning for Obama local, it was much harder to be you know, talking trash on people's front porch, like to their face, and so the coarseness of the dialogue that is so easy to perform on social media and at a distance, you know, slinging mud at states far away, at Washington, It's just harder to do that in community. People you see at the market, people you see when you drop your kids off at school, and that those zones have been infected with that.
Same poison of division.
And there's an antidote, which is investing in relationships. That's one of the big pillars of how the citizen. Those who've been on this feed for a while know that we repeat it ad nauseum. If you're new, we got one of these principles of citizen as a verb is to invest in relationships with yourself, with others and the planet around you. And once you establish relationship, it's just harder to demonize and vilify and see someone as an enemy, even as they may still be your opponent, even as
you may still have real disagreements. So that's the spirit of today's offering. I think the story is shorter than my setup for it, but I'm just going to use this audio feed to provide a bit more context and lay the ground for what you're about to hear. Please go to story howtositizen dot com. Join the email lists. We will do some kind of summary wrap up thing. We're dropping an update every day to drive to these stories,
their video stories. So you're obviously on an audio feed here in this and you can find those video stories linked right from those email newsletters. They are linked in my own substack newsletter dot baritunday dot com.
Be very easy.
I'll keep them archived there, and they're linked on social media on LinkedIn for me and John, and on Instagram for me, baratun Day for how to Citizen the account, and for the citizens guy plural that's John. So giving you a lot of places to engage. Please comment, please share, Please lift up other examples where you see people building bridges, building deep relationship across division to move the community forward, and in today's case, that community it's for the cheering
it's about school boards. So enjoy and I'm liking this voice memo mode.
No big studio, no big.
Mic, just talking louder than I should into my smartphone. Let's get smart. We'll deal with all the noise and the nonsense in a real good way.
Love.
If we only see stories of how divided we are, we're going to be divided.
That's the national story.
But when you zoom in on any community, you find people trying to live together, neighbors who want to be neighborly. This is the story of two neighbors who built relationship across.
Their division as members of the school board.
This local story is happening all over the nation, which kind of makes it a national story.
It makes you wonder why you're not hearing it more.
It was very contentious. There was a lot of tension on the school board, to the point where the communication had really broken down and the board was not able to address the shoes that school boards need to address and make the kinds of decisions they need to make because they couldn't have hard conversations in a productive way. I had been on the board for like five seconds and he was like, yep, you're gonna be the brig builder us. Like Lance, that's a lot of pressure in here.
We've got some different viewpoints on some things.
When I realized over the courts of time, maybe our viewpoints wasn't as far apart as what I thought.
Lance and Steph were both participants in our Uniting to Prevent Targeted Violence in South Central Pennsylvania program. He would not characterize himself as a liberal, although he leans liberal on a lot of issues, particularly the kinds of issues that tend to face school boards. Steph is also a community member in Chambersburg. She would characterize herself as conservative.
In our Uniting for Action programs, we intentionally teach the community members who are participating to develop active listening skills and to explore each other's perspectives across difference from a perspective of curiosity. They built this really enduring relationship such that when Steph was elected to the board, the existing board members expected that she would join the right leaning contingent, and Lance was already on the sort of left leaning contingent,
if we can call it that. But they refused to buy into that narrative. They resisted this intense pressure really to polarize and to demonize, and were able to really shift the dynamic on the school board to make it much more productive.