Tag: Connecting

Resisting Polarization and Encouraging Compassion

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Double rainbow and seagulls over Niagara Falls, with onlookers

We humans like to place people into buckets: good and bad, left and right, us and them. This seems to be an age-old tendency, and it isn’t all that surprising that the rise of social media and the proliferation of news and opinion platforms have allowed our divisions to become more entrenched and more apparent. We can choose to read and listen to only those sources that affirm what we already feel and believe, and we can respond to those who disagree while protected by a screen that keeps us from seeing and experiencing their humanity, their emotional reactions.  Our quickly typed words can be amplified through shares and retweets, carried far beyond the small circles that might once have heard them.

Many, many people have written about the heightened state of polarization in which we live these days, lamenting how destructive it is and postulating about what led to this environment.  It is distressing and disheartening.  But it doesn’t have to be this way.

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The Last Man on Earth: What Would You Do?

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A rugged, uninhabited mountain landscape

One of my favorite TV shows right now is The Last Man on Earth.  The show’s premise is that a viral outbreak has killed nearly all people and animals, save a few who were immune or unexposed.  At the beginning of the show, we meet Phil Miller, who’s been traveling the country trying to find other survivors after losing everyone he knew.  He’s miserable and lonely, and just when he’s about to give up on life, he meets another survivor, Carol.  As the series progresses, a few others join them.  Phil struggles to adjust to living with people again.  The circumstances bring together dissimilar people who likely would not have crossed paths before the virus, and we watch them try to figure out how to live in this new world.  The show is quirky, funny, creative, and at times poignant, though it’s not as depressing as you might guess.

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Life Lessons from an Easter Egg Hunt

- Alexis 1 Comment

The author as a child posing with an inflatable Easter Bunny

One of my earliest childhood memories is of an Easter egg hunt that my dad’s company hosted when I was about three.  On a sunny Saturday morning, the employees’ young children gathered in front of a building facing a big lawn where plastic eggs had been scattered.  Someone said go, and a mob of older children sprinted onto the grass, grabbing eggs and shoving them into plastic bags.  I was younger than most of the kids and wasn’t entirely sure what was happening.  The eggs hadn’t been hidden well; it wasn’t a hunt so much as a race.  My little legs couldn’t run very fast, and it seemed like every time my searching eyes spotted a brightly colored piece of plastic, someone else got to it before I did.  Within a few minutes, all of the eggs had been captured.  I had one lonely egg in my clear plastic bag.

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Bridge the Gap: Start a Conversation, Change Your Perception

- Alexis Leave a comment
A brightly colored abstract painting
Inner Space/Outer Space, 2014. For details or to purchase, please contact Alexis.

The public radio program On Being, as part of its Civil Conversations Project, recently aired an interview called “Repairing the Breach” (transcript). The show featured a white male Libertarian leader of the Tea Party movement, Matt Kibbe, and a black female millennial progressive leader, Heather McGhee, discussing how we can engage difference and better understand each other.

Near the end of the show (at 44:30), Heather brought up a conversation she had with Gary from North Carolina on a C-SPAN call-in show last year.  Gary called into the show, admitted to being prejudiced, and explained why he thought he held certain attitudes.  Then he asked Ms. McGhee how he could change, “to become a better American.”  McGhee thanked him for his honesty and offered suggestions such as getting to know black families, reading books about the history of African-Americans in the U.S., or attending a black church.  The video clip went viral.

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