The Village Square

A Purple State of dialogue

December 15th, 2009

You can probably tell why we kind of like our friends at Purple State of Mind just a little from this post by John Marks. We think they do such important work that we moved heaven and earth to bring them to Tallahassee last spring. So why not go on over to Purple and find out what we mean.

…the idea of a Purple State of dialogue, in which people could speak their minds across ideological divides and yet still respect their opponents, ceased to be a nice idea about politeness and became an urgent attempt to reverse the national meltdown. One clear sign of the urgency has been our discovery of like-minded projects around the United States, whether the folks at the Village Square in Tallahassee or the people behind the website Science and Religion Today, who recently reached out to us.

It’s no coincidence that our project has a special relevance in Florida. Municipalities and counties have been dealing with ferocious political and cultural confrontation non-stop for at least a decade, and lots of people down there are exhausted. We saw strong signs of a new push to improve the terms of combat, but we also know they have their work cut out for them.

This coming March, the Republican primary contest for a Florida Senate seat promises to be a donnybrook between moderate conservative Governor Charlie Crist and conservative darling Marco Rubio. That contest shows all the signs of becoming a civil war within the state Republican Party, but it’ll be a national test, too, a measure of how good or bad things are state-wide.

Thank goodness, Tallahassee has its angels. While spending time in the state capital, where the local film festival honored the movie with an award for audience favorite, we met the ingenious and inexhaustible Liz Joyner. Her organization, The Village Square, hasn’t indulged in wishful thinking, ala Rodney King. It jumped into the fray. This year, while we wrung our hands about the decline in civility, Joyner jumped into the lion’s den and hosted a series of discussions about healthcare, doing everything in her power to bring both conservative and democratic voices into the room.

By her own account, it was exhausting, and she didn’t manage to get the ranks to fall in love with each other, but there was a dialogue, and there will be more.

Thanks to Liz, we got to Tallahassee. Thanks to Wendy Abberger, president of Leadership Florida, we began to see ramifications of our project that had never been obvious before. Wendy is extremely well-connected throughout the business and political communities across the state, and after seeing our presentations at St. John’s Episcopal Church, she invited us to speak to her organization’s annual meeting in Orlando.

In preparation for that event, she told us that her group would be less interested in the religious aspects of our conversation and more interested in the notion of civic dialogue. She also let us know that Leadership members liked their speakers to offer practical advice and asked us for a kind of tool kit for dialogue. I wrote an essay for the event that became the blueprint for what you can now read on our About page.

As important as that conversation was, the Leadership event itself turned out to be the real turning point of the year. It was mid June. Earlier in the year, Texas Governor Rick Perry had made noises about secession, a perennial political flower as reliable as the bluebonnets in spring, and yet scarier somehow in our current climate. The Wall Street Journal ran a big take-out piece that weekend on what secession would look like. Meanwhile, the healthcare town hall meetings had started to get extremely ugly.

Standing before that crowd of 300 or so business leaders, we didn’t need to talk about god to get anyone’s attention. All we had to do was hold up a newspaper…

Read the whole piece by John HERE.

Entry Filed under: Purple State of Mind