How Did We Get Here?
It’s taken me all this time to figure out how we got here, how we all got here. Looking back at the start of the Front Porch Movement in 2015, I honestly thought we could cut through the country’s polarization and find conversations that, however difficult, would still bring us together. I went places filled with my raging curiosity and looked carefully for people I felt had something to say, something to add, if only someone just asked them. I approached strangers with no notes, no prepared questions. and no preconceived opinions. And I asked.
DECEMBER 8, 2015- My first encounter was a little overwhelming. I attended the annual musical memorial at Strawberry Fields in Central Park on the anniversary of John Lennon’s murder. I’m still not sure who was more surprised, me standing on a bench scoping the scene, or a father and son on the outskirts of the Imagine circle. I bravely approached them and asked if they would take part in this experiment and talk to me. They were brave too. What evolved was unexpected, enlightening, and funny, and I think back on that day often, especially every December 8th.
DECEMBER 24, 2015- Next, after leaving an early Christmas Eve church service in an unusual place, with no place to go and no one to go to, I was drawn for some reason to make a U-turn, go back to the church, to find the pastor. I learned he had emigrated from Russia when he was five, worked for the CIA for his second job out of college, and somehow became a pastor of this church shared with a temple.
DECEMBER 31, 2015- Back to Central Park, a block from where I lived and a place that made the city less urban for me and my dog Sally. Minding my business, the tables turned when a dog-loving, young woman runner slowed down to a trot and struck up a conversation with me. Her story of surviving death twice was hard to follow at first. Hard too was the email I received from a family member informing me she had tragically died almost a year to the day we met. They found our often-humorous conversation online and played it at her memorial service. I thought, what I gift. They also asked if I would mind meeting the woman’s newlywed husband who had a few questions of how this chance encounter came to be. Civic engagement started in Central Park, continued at a funeral service, and then over dinner with her husband.
So I was off and running, talking to strangers to see if I could fill a hole in conversations that we weren’t having, and that we had grown blind to even realize we were missing. I recorded conversations on a moving New York City subway, in the doorway of a bustling Brooklyn restaurant, in a church pew filled with fear and grief on a night after the 2016 election, in a barbershop with a first time voter, and on a park bench with a famed journalist trying to make sense of where America went.
America did go somewhere and I realized polarization was a winning recipe and civic engagement and all its promise was dead. Maybe I’d return someday but as I now see in previous blog posts, I started to find civic engagement in musicians and music, and I started two more civic engagement projects, The Tour and That One Lyric that unlocked my joy and introduced me to amazing people and conversations, all filled with wonder, inspiration, and heart. In my time away, I also read more than I had in previous years. And just like the curiosity I brought to the Front Porch Movement 10 years ago, and to my other projects since, these books, taken together, infused a dramatic escalation of my views of how we got here.
Looking back, perhaps I was naive in thinking that if only we talked more, we’d listen more, and understand one another more. That’s what died in the last 10 years- listening and understanding. So today I return to this project with a harsher reality of civic engagement, our country and its future. But I did return. And I think I’m ready to share the things that keep me from falling asleep, keep me up in the middle of the night, and keep me searching for answers every morning.