Discovering Common Ground

It’s much easier to love someone when you know their story.

Fred Rogers was famous for saying this.

It’s our understanding that a social worker had given him a piece of paper with words to this effect on it. He carried those words in his pocket every day after receiving them.

He believed them to be true. His great listening abilities enabled him to listen deeply, with undivided attention to others. By doing so, he was able to see beyond a person’s facade. Mister Rogers had the gift of going beyond the outer layers and pretenses we all can so easily put up around us. He was able to see into a person’s heart, spirit, and soul. And without condemnation or judgment, he helped so many to safely uncover their deepest inner feelings. He was able to uncover their deeper essence, their fears and hopes, their ultimate goodness and potential. It changed the lives of countless people throughout his life. It changed those lives for the good.

That is why he has been a model of listening, hearing, and noticing, for us. His sincere and pure desire to know others deeply and well serves as our guidestar in everything we do. 

Oh, how we need that guidestar in our world today.

In our lonely, disconnected, fractious, angry, turbulent world, we need Mister Rogers’ way of connecting more than we can fully say. 

Especially, in this toxic political atmosphere, where many people have deeply differing, dangerously divided beliefs and opinions, and can’t or won’t try to dig deeper into what has led to those opposing beliefs. We tend to cancel quickly, condemn brutally, and consider more often how to oppose than we do how to find any common ground and understanding. We aren’t listening for how to achieve consensus and a win-win for everyone. Instead, we are hearing what we don’t like and then considering how to refute and rebuff all that we don’t like. Disrespect is rampant. Doing the hard and painstaking work of getting to know one another better and forging common solutions based on our varied experiences, feelings, and needs is easy to avoid. 

And that’s what delivered us to this place and time in which we are unable to make this world the better place that it needs and is meant to be.

Knowing someone’s story and coming to understand them a little more is the way to better relationships, to a better world. By respecting others and beginning to see them in a human way - with fears, insecurities, hopes, and dreams - we can discover that we inherently have much more in common than what we have that separates or divides us. We think this is a key to help us bridge our divides - especially the political divides that all too frustratingly divide us in our current political environment. 

Who among us doesn’t want safer communities, fair and reasonable prices, effective education, jobs that enable us to afford a healthy life and bring us meaning and satisfaction? Who among us doesn’t want to be discriminated against or treated fairly in all aspects of our lives? Who among us doesn’t want to live peacefully and to have a good and meaningful life?

Who doesn't want those things for themselves and for those they love?

Politics, in its perfect form, is supposed to be about helping people - locally, nationally, internationally - to have fair and equal access to those basic things. Those hopes and desires that are incredibly common to most of us.

We can easily despair that life today - and it’s nothing new - has too many divisions, disagreements, and disconnections that keep us apart, alienating us from one another, looking at each other as enemies, unworthy, undeserving of the good life we feel that we ourselves deserve. 

Someone to Tell It To stands firmly on these guiding principles - that everyone deserves to be treated with dignity, respect, and kindness. Everyone needs and wants to be heard, to be listened to, to be considered with fairness. 

It’s not easy to work at understanding, considering others’ perspectives and what is behind and beneath them, and then striving to create ways of meeting one another’s needs in the fairest ways possible. We can’t sugarcoat that reality. But it is worth trying. It really is. Because that’s how what is divided can begin to come together, how disagreements can begin to lessen, and how disappointment can begin to turn toward satisfaction. 

There is hope in the trying. There is progress in the work. There is joy in knowing that we have listened and responded to what we have heard - with grace, with humility, with love for what connects us as human beings.

It is what connects that leads us toward the answers that will bring us all the better world that we dream about every day.