Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: red/blue schism

[Tree Bressen (tree]

Hi Saoirse & others,

Great topic!  Here are some articles to check out for further reading:

Tom Atlee of the Co-Intelligence Institute wrote a bunch of great material 
on polarization this past year:
http://www.co-intelligence.org/polarization.html

And the Christian Science Monitor published an 8-part series called 
"Talking with the Enemy," available at:
http://www.csmonitor.com/commentary/conversations.html
I particularly recommend Part 8, by Laura Chasin of the great Public 
Conversations Project (http://publicconversations.org)

I believe that when it comes to crossing such divides, personal 
relationships are the most important factor.  (That's why LGBT activists 
have encouraged as many queer-identified people as possible to come out and 
be known, because the research shows that heterosexual people's opinions on 
issues related to sexual orientation shift a lot once they personally know 
someone who openly identifies as LGBT.) While i think in general the Coho-L 
list is commendably civil and free of flames, i remember noticing during an 
upset on the list some years back that i heard the two disputants more 
sympathetically than they heard each other, which i attributed to the fact 
that having met them in person i felt warmly toward both of them and had a 
feel for their different ways of expressing themselves.

As the Let's Talk America project says, "What if what unites us is more 
than we realize . . . and what divides us is less than we fear?"

Cheers,

--Tree



-----------------------------------------------

Tree Bressen
1680 Walnut St.
Eugene, OR 97403
(541) 484-1156
tree [at] ic.org
http://www.treegroup.info