like and appreciate the others' lives and opinions? "How is it possible to bridge the gulf between a group of Leverett liberals and red-state descendants of coal miners who voted for Donald Trump?"
Hands Across the Hills
Quote:
After the 2016 presidential election, conflict resolution expert Paula Green and a group of liberal voters in Leverett, Massachusetts, met in the town's library to discuss how they would move forward as a community — and as a divided country.
"We didn't know where we would reach out or how we would reach out, but we felt that it was very important to increase as many connectors as we could between people and reduce the dividers," Green tells Here & Now’s Robin Young, "because the deep divides become chasms, and then they become cataclysms, and before long, we can't talk to each other at all."
The group, Hands Across the Hills — Green's brainchild that would later win her an Alliance for Peace award — wound up reaching across the political spectrum to the coal-country town of Whitesburg, Kentucky, nearly 850 miles away, in order to spark a dialogue.
"I was a little apprehensive — afraid it was another 'save the dumb hillbillies' project," says Gwen Johnson, a Whitesburg resident. Despite her trepidation, Johnson says she "knew it was a conversation that needed to be had."
"So I just got my courage up and said, 'OK, I'll be one of the ones who stands out and speaks up,' " she says.
Two years later and after many home visits, emails, Skype sessions and cultural events, members of the two groups say they not only have a profound understanding of what motivates one another, but also friendships they anticipate will last a lifetime.
Interview Highlights
On how residents in Whitesburg initially responded to Green's group reaching out to them
Gwen Johnson: "We've really been exploited many times by the media, who come and look at the very worst of the worst, and we decided to draft an email in response, just asking what the motivation was."
On Trump's promise to revive the coal industry being a major reason why so many Whitesburg residents voted for him
Johnson: "Our people in our county voted almost the exact same percentage for Trump that Leverett, Massachusetts, voted for Hillary."[The coal industry is] very important, because our people don't want handouts. We want an economy that works for all of us. We want to feed the children and put shoes on their feet, and the coal miners here were the benevolent ones, who spent their money and [kept] the civic organizations and the churches [going]. And all the people who don't have a revenue stream, it was the coal miners who always funded that."
"We didn't know what was going to transpire between us, and although we don't agree politically, we've come to love and care about each other a great deal." Paula Green
On what Johnson feared about Green and her group visiting Whitesburg
Johnson: "That we would not be heard and that we would not be accepted. And the thing that I kept worrying about was that maybe they wouldn't be able to forgive us for voting for President Trump."
On the preparation that went into the first visit
Paula Green: "We spent six months preparing for this meeting. This was no casual meeting. We had endless correspondence and Skypes and phone calls. We had prepared all sorts of community events, we had music and dance and drama and art, and so we had a very full and rich and safe agenda prepared for everybody, and we know how much fear there was even with all that."
On what the two groups discovered through their trips
Green: "The biggest puzzle I think for many progressives is: Why did people vote for this president? Were they voting against their own interests? Which we hear over and over again. And I learned that they were voting for their interests, because their interest was coal, and Trump promised to bring back coal when Hillary talked about shutting down the mines. So it became very clear to me that these folks were voting for a very important interest: their survival.
"What was astounding for us [was] we didn't know what was going to transpire between us, and although we don't agree politically, we've come to love and care about each other a great deal."
Read the entire article:
http://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2018/11/ ... s-politicsHands Across the Hills website:
https://www.handsacrossthehills.org/
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The river is the melody
And sky is the refrain - Gordon Lightfoot
28 Nov 2018, 3:52 pm
