“Hot Buttons” don’t have to start fires.

I’ve spent a lot of time at home with my family over the past couple of weeks, coming home to Virginia Beach and hanging out with family from Indiana, Iowa and Colorado means spending a lot of time with people of opposite political ideologies.

I know, feminists, we’ve all been there.  Grandma asks what we’ve been up to at school and we realize our resume is made up of “College Dems”, “Sister Speak”, “Madison Equality” and myriad other liberally minded activities that aren’t easy to chat about with your conservatively minded grandma, Aunt Bertha or even your Mom & Dad.

I think living in the college bubble lulls us into the idea that everyone should believe the same things that we do.  College is the one time in your life that you can spend surrounded with people whose minds work like yours so you can strengthen your stances on issues of political importance.

But then we have to take our strong minds into the real world.  A world filled with other strong minds that don’t work the same way ours do.  And that’s tough.  I guarantee you that within the course of your life, you will find yourselves surrounded with friends, neighbors and coworkers whom you will love and appreciate, but never be able to see eye-to-eye with politically.

I was listening to this thing on NPR (I know, surprise, right?) about how sad it is that our polarized media has made it near impossible for the two sides to have a civil conversation about any hot-button political issue.

Interestingly enough, one of the guest’s on the segment was Harrisonburg’s own Mayor, Kai Degner.  Now, I’ll go ahead and say upfront that Kai is one of my favorite people on this earth.  We met when he was running for Mayor in 2008 and when I was waiting in line outside the Convocation Center to see Barack Obama share his campaign speech.  Kai asked if I was registered to vote in Harrisonburg, and I told him right off the bat that I voted absentee in Virginia Beach.  Upon realizing that I wasn’t his target demographic, many politicians would have walked away.  However, Kai stayed and chatted with me about his ideals and just proved to me how much he wanted the mayoral position.  He was amazing, I was inspired just in our ten-minute conversation.

Degner. a JMU grad, was also a founding member of the Orange Band Initiative, or The Listening Project.  If you aren’t familiar with the Orange Band Initiative, you should be.  It’s a really amazing project that distributes strips of orange cloth that participants then fasten to themselves or their belongings to start conversations.  “When asked about the OrangeBand, they say something like, “It means I’m interested in listening to what’s important to the people around me. What’s important to you?”

This central idea is what the folks on NPR also discussed.  We may live in a diverse world of beliefs, but that doesn’t mean our beliefs need to start fights.  Between Fox News and MSNBC, one might think there’s no way we could ever find any middle ground, but that simply isn’t true.  You can find a middle ground just by listening to one another.