What I learned while writing Remaking the Space Between Us
No one is coming to save us. Time for some barn-raising.
“The genie is out of the bottle — Part 2” will appear, as scheduled, next weekend. This post marks the launch of my book by sharing what I learned along the way.
After two-and-a-half years of research and writing, Remaking the Space Between Us is finally out. It was an exhausting and exhilarating couple of years. Exhausting because so many of us are struggling and so much is at stake that I wanted to get the book out quickly and move people to act. No pressure there! Exhilarating because each day I uncovered extraordinary stories about “unlikely allies” working together across divides to remake the space between us, so we can build a better future for all of us, not just some of us.
The idea for the book came in the early days of the pandemic, as I saw and felt its catastrophic effects bringing to life Sebastian Junger’s observation in Tribe:
“What catastrophes seem to do—sometimes in the span of a few minutes—is turn back the clock on 10,000 years of social evolution. Self-interest gets subsumed into group interest because there is no survival outside group survival.”
Every day I would get up and turn on my computer in this isolated reality we all shared, and every day, I would get the internet’s algorithm-driven take on how We the People were responding to this perfect storm of a pandemic, a racial reckoning, and a divisive presidency. Too often, it felt as if I was hanging from a cliff, along with everyone else, on the verge of falling back to medieval times. As far as the internet eye could see were stories predicting how we were catapulting toward some calamitous end and how this or that person, policy, or politician was the slingshot sending us all there. You and me? Well, we figured only on the receiving end of the sling shot. Passive, powerless, and petty.
After reading one sorry story after another about how far back We the People were falling, I stumbled upon a “media anomaly” — a short 1995 PBS documentary about what the people in Billings, Montana were doing to push the clock of evolution forward by cooperating with one another to build communities stronger than hate. I learned that this documentary, called Not in Our Town, had since launched a locally rooted and nationally connected citizen-led movement by the same name. For over 20 years, Not in Our Town (NIOT) had been bringing together non-profits, law enforcement agencies, faith-based organizations, educators, public TV stations, labor organizations, and others to turn bystanders into “upstanders” — citizens who respond to acts of hate by getting to work bridging divides and strengthening their communities. I was amazed to discover that over those 20 years, local chapters of Not in Our Town had spread from one town to another, springing up across most of the country, almost entirely under the media’s radar (see essay 10: Taking a Stand and essay 16: Putting Faith in Friendship).
Figure 1: Not In Our Town’s Local Chapters
This, I thought, is our toehold. Many years as a change agent had trained me to look for some kind of toehold, some way people can move up and forward in the face of forces pushing them down and backward. But then, after pulling on the thread of that first story and uncovering another, and then another, and then another after that, I realized that something big was happening: thousands upon thousands of citizens across the country were working together on common problems, healing historic divides and strengthening their communities. In the process, whether intended or not, they were gradually opening up the closed, insular spaces within groups and closing the distant, hostile spaces across them.
This wasn’t just a toehold. This was our hidden passage to a better future.
The back story
Decades of work in systems large and small, from families and organizations to communities and nations, led me to view all the data on polarization—its having doubled since 2000, its growing worse here than in any other advanced democracy—as a symptom and not the root cause of our woes as a nation and as a people.
The root cause has been around forever. Though largely overlooked, it is lying in plain sight. It is the untended underbrush that makes us constantly vulnerable to conflagrations when ignited by some circumstance (pandemic) or change (the rise of the internet) or manipulation (those seeking to amass power by driving a wedge between us).
But if you step back, squint your eyes, and look at patterns, not just events highlighted by the media, you can see that the root cause is this:
Ever since we “set forth on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” We the People have lived separate lives in groups divided along demographic and ideological lines.
Periodically throughout our history, these groups have grown ever more insular and closed within and ever more distant and hostile across, each trend reinforcing the other: the more closed and insular we grow within groups, the more distant and hostile we grow across them, and vice versa. Today, under the force of circumstance, change, and manipulation, these trends in and across groups are growing especially dangerous, turning We the People into the one of the biggest threats to a government of the people, for the people and by the people. Why? Because:
They pit groups against each other, rendering us powerless — unable to tackle all the other threats we face from immigration to climate change to widening inequities to failing educational, healthcare, and justice systems and beyond.
Time for some barn raising
I didn’t know where my investigation into the space between us would lead. After stumbling upon Not in Our Town, I thought I might find a few hundred groups working across divides to move our nation forward. I never imagined that I’d uncover thousands of citizen groups bringing hundreds of thousands of people together across lines of race, place, gender, class, age, sector, and party in communities across the country all the way up to the halls of Congress (see essays in Parts 2 – 4).
The one thing these motley groups all have in common is a laser-like focus on some audacious goal, whether it be making communities safe from hate and violence or increasing access to healthcare or ending homelessness in their city or stopping culture wars in their schools or reinventing the kind of news that’s fit to print (go to the Solutions Journalism Network to find hundreds of these stories).
This goal-oriented work across demographic and ideological boundaries, taken together as a whole, is remaking the space between us, so we can together build a future that works for all, not just some.
And that insight brought me back full circle to a part of our past that holds the key to our future. There is an old, cherished tradition in America called barn raising, all but gone except in a few communities. In the old days, barn raising was a common undertaking, in which members of a community would come together to build a barn for one of its members.
The spirit of that tradition lives on in these citizen-led groups spreading across our land. Only now, people are coming together across communities to raise a metaphorical barn for our nation, one large and generous enough to encompass all the groups that make up We the People. Like those who raised barns for members of their community, those raising a barn for our nation know three things to be true:
We need each other to raise a barn. In Maine, after the turn of the millennium, Somali immigrants helped revive the state’s dying towns, while a multi-racial people’s alliance helped make Maine their home. Each group—the old Mainers and the new Mainers, the Black Mainers and the White Mainers—needed the other to rebuild the state’s economy and ensure its future growth (see essay 12: Coming Together and a recent New York Timesarticle).
Barn raising is reciprocal. In Pittsburgh, after the 2018 antisemitic attack on the Tree of Life synagogue, the Black community came to the aid of the Jewish community. Two years later, Tim Smith, pastor of Keystone Church in Pittsburgh, called on the Jewish community to reciprocate after George Floyd’s murder. “Right now, the house that’s on fire are the houses of Black people,” he said. “There are some things that we need to fix. We’re going to have to combine our networks to get this job done” (see essay 16: Putting Faith in Friendship).
Barn-raising builds the community needed to raise future barns. The sense of community and belonging generated by these citizen groups is the single biggest antidote to the epidemic of loneliness and unhappiness through which hate and violence spread. “We are not enemies but friends,” implored Lincoln on the cusp of the Civil War. The common work undertaken by these groups reminds us that we are friends, not enemies, and that our self-interests are inextricably intertwined (see the essays in Part 3).
All of this has led me to believe that today’s headlines reflect the last dying gasps of a failing order. If you look beyond those headlines, you can catch a glimpse of a new order rising, one in which Americans come together to build a better future. This new order reflects what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. put best: “We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
Want a better future? Stop waiting for someone to save us and join those already building it. Time for some barn raising!
I am eager to hear what this post made you feel and think, so please let me and others know, so we can keep learning.