Often in these articles I have stressed the need to talk to one another. The very first article I posted here, “Signs, Signs,” commented on the way many protest signs discourage communication among people with different viewpoints. Last November, in “It’s Down To Me and Thee,” I said that, as a progressive, I needed to find a conservative white woman to talk to on a regular basis.

Let’s just say that people don’t stand on the corners with labels, waiting for us to pick out someone to talk to about today’s most important issues. Mostly we end up talking to people who think the way we think, recycling the same arguments over and over about why our own values and our own perspectives are justified.

But something happened in my little village a couple of weeks ago. Someone defaced a Black Lives Matter lawn sign, made it read “black olives matter.” When the event was discussed on our town’s Facebook page, a lot of people with progressive viewpoints commented.

One lone voice on the page kept repeating the statement that more whites than blacks are killed by police, even provided a graph. No mention of the context for that fact: much higher numbers of whites in the population ;  the high number of white victims carrying guns, vs. the number of black victims that were unarmed. Here’s the reality, as reported in the online magazine, City Lab, 8/6/2019:

Still, where were all the other people  who voted for Trump and support our country’s current policies? What would they say about this defacing of a Black Lives Matter sign? The fact that it happened means that someone feels that Black Lives Matter is an unnecessary movement for equality. Are the voices of those who fight for equality and social justice so strong in this particular part of New England that others are afraid to speak up in opposition to anything that touches upon those topics?

I am going to the tiny town common up the street today. I have three signs with me:

“Please come talk to me if you support our country’s current immigration policies.”

“If you think we have enough gun control in this country, please come talk to me.”

“White people need to support Black Lives Matter. If you disagree, please come talk to me.”

Because, we have to start talking to one another. We have to listen to points of view that are different from our own. We have to learn what it is that other people value. We have to be able to weigh whether some of those values held by others would be good for the country.

Please think about whether you could do something like this in your own neighborhood. I’ve come to believe it is the only way we can claw ourselves out of this trench we have been digging to divide ourselves up and choose which side of the chasm we stand on. I’d like to see us figure out how to stay whole, stay together with our differences and be one country, indivisible.