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The Hello Project

The Hello Project

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It’s called the Hello Project, I think, although I can’t seem to learn much about it online. I heard about it last night at book group. People are paired with their political opposites and have phone conversations, a Rust Belt conservative with an East Coast liberal. It’s a way to share views and bridge the great divide.

What I can’t stop thinking about it, though, is how it’s come to this. Why do we require such artificial means to such natural ends: honest sharing of views, speaking without censure? Why do so few of us know people from the Other Side?

Is it because we live in boxes and zip codes and echo chambers? Because we’re angry and afraid? Some of these, to be sure, but probably much more: fissures widening so slowly and inexorably that we haven’t realized they were there until they’ve become almost too big to bridge.

I’m glad there’s a Hello Project. But I’m sorry we need it. It’s as if we cut down all the trees in a forest and then planted saplings in their wake. Yes, I’d be glad for the saplings, but I would mourn the old trees, so strong and true.

Radical Love

Radical Love

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Usually on Valentine’s Day I write about personal love. And I’m certainly thinking of it today, feeling grateful for my family and friends, all those I hold dear. But these are extraordinary times, and they call for the most radical and extreme of actions.

They call for love.

“If we are stretching to live wiser and not just smarter,” says Krista Tippett in her book Becoming Wise, “we will aspire to learn what love means, how it arises and deepens, how it withers and revives, what it looks like as a private good but also a common good.”

Tippett, the host of NPR’s “On Being,” describes the love shown by 1960s civil rights workers, their belief in the “beloved community” that meant they were fighting for equality with courtesy and kindness.  “This was love as a way of being, not a feeling, which transcended grievance and painstakingly transformed violence,” Tippett writes.

Though her book was published just last year, it already seems to hail from another era, a time when were not yet as deeply divided as we are now. Tippett doesn’t address the division as much as she would had she been writing a year later, but reading her book makes me think about how much further we’d be if treated each other with courtesy and kindness.

Maybe love is what we need, love translated into forbearance and understanding, into biting our tongues and holding our applause. Divisiveness got us into this mess. Maybe love can get us out.

Framing It

Framing It

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In today’s Washington Post, a column by Margaret Sullivan called “Old Rules of Journalism Don’t Apply” covers the firing of a Marketplace columnist, a transgender man who posted on Medium that journalists, especially minority journalists, must rethink objectivity in the Trump era.

I think the firing was legitimate because the post clearly violated one of Marketplace’s written guidelines, but the columnist raises an important point. We have our jobs and we have our morals. What happens if the two are on a collision course?

This blog is hardly Marketplace or the Washington Post, and it’s almost always apolitical. But I’ve been wrestling with how much to talk about What’s Going On. These are unusual times, so political posts may creep in a little more than they used to.

But I hope not too much. Because as frightening and upending as things have become (at least in the politically super-charged air of the nation’s capital), I still believe that perspective and empathy are our greatest weapons (along with family, friends, humor and chocolate). And perspective and empathy are what I’m after here.

Perspective

Perspective

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The peaceful transfer of power is a hallmark of our nation. That will happen in less two hours — and about 36 miles from where I’m sitting.

It’s not the transfer of power that I was hoping for, but that’s not the point. It’s a transfer, and it’s happening. After it’s complete, we can move forward, doing what we must to protect the nation, which has weathered wars and riots and a near-fatal split. 
I remind myself that eight years ago others were as worried and disappointed as I am now. I might think I have more cause for concern (and I do!), but I imagine those folks would disagree with me. 
Perspective — I’m working on it today. And I will be for quite some time.
The Capitol and the Copter

The Capitol and the Copter

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I’m setting aside other post ideas today to write about one of the zanier things that’s happened lately in the nation’s capital. I speak, of course, of the 61-year-old mailman who landed his gyrocopter on the west Capitol lawn to draw attention to the need for campaign finance reform.

The Secret Service didn’t intercept him, nor did NORAD. People in the area (if only I had been on one of my Wednesday walks!) told the Washington Post that the craft looked official with its Postal Service logo. Only when officers surrounded the craft did one bystander realize that “it was someone doing something crazy.”

When I lived in New York, people were always doing crazy things. Now that I live in buttoned-down D.C., the crazy things happen less often but are more notable. A farmer driving a tractor to the Mall and threatening to blow it up. A number of White House intruders, one of whom made it all the way to Obama’s quarters before being noticed. An intelligence agency employee who accidentally crashed a drone on White House grounds.

I’m tempted to say “only in D.C.” … but I won’t!

(The lawn in the foreground = copter’s landing pad.)

Burying the Lead

Burying the Lead

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Though it originates in our nation’s capital, this blog is decidedly apolitical — with a few exceptions, several of them also occurring, curiously enough, on 9/11. What I have to say today is not a solemn memorial, though — it’s an editor’s view of President Obama’s speech on Syria.

Maybe it’s because I’m in the final stages of getting the magazine to the printer and am thinking best with a red pen in my hand, but it struck me last night that the startling new diplomatic developments that began emerging  the day before yesterday were not so much fully incorporated into the president’s speech as they were tacked on at the end. This gave the address a confusing inconsistency.

For at least two-thirds of the 17-minute speech Obama told us why we should use force to punish the Assad regime for using chemical weapons against its own people — and then for the next five he told us that the vote to authorize such force was postponed in order to explore a diplomatic solution. We in the journalism biz call this burying the lead.

This didn’t just confuse me; it made me feel used. As George Orwell pointed out 67 years ago in his essay “Politics and the English Language, “…[T]he decline of a language must ultimately have political
and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that
individual writer. But an effect can become a cause…” As he noted a few paragraphs later, “[I]f thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

Perhaps there is no hope for political speech. Orwell didn’t think there was. “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible,” he said.  It’s hard to believe that the world has improved much in the last seven decades.

But if last night’s explanation had been more honest from the start, it would at least have gotten my attention.  And perhaps even earned my respect.