Back in February I visited my mother, who lives in Pennsylvania, which is also the state I grew up in, and where my family lived for most of my children’s younger years. I have many fond memories and feelings associated with the state of Pennsylvania – of the rolling farmlands, of ice-skating on brooks and ponds (before climate change), and of hoagies and pork roll sandwiches and the apple-cinnamon bread from the Amish farmers’ market stands.
In recent years, as we visit family and friends in Pa from our home in California, those fond feelings are tempered by seeing, during our visits there, all the Trump signs on people’s lawns. The Trump supporters in Pa (and I assume elsewhere) don’t just post signs on their lawns; they get the biggest signs possible, and they often post accompanying commentary, like, “NO ONE WILL TAKE OUR GUNS” and “GOD WANTS US TO MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.”
The evidence of how much my beloved home state has embraced a leader who’s a felon, a rapist, and a generally depraved and corrupt person is hard for me to see. It is also so goddamn confusing. Because in general, I like the people of Pennsylvania. There is much I love about California, but one of the things I really don’t care for is how detached the people can feel out here. They smile a lot, they are superficially friendly, they love your dog and you love theirs, but it is hard to find people who seem to, I don’t know how else to put it, actually care about the state of the world. Perhaps part of it has to do with how many cultures and ethnicities are present in California, it’s hard to get a bead on where and how these groups might align and work with one another. When doing routine errands like going to a gym or shopping for groceries, I am constantly encountering a million different types of people, and I can’t help noticing that they have very different ideas than I do about standing in line, how to drive or park one’s car, or the best ways to secure the best and freshest vegetables at the farmers’ market.
The people of Pennsylvania, on the other hand, I’ve mostly found to be extremely nice and down-to-earth. (Aside from a few overtly racist encounters from my childhood there.) Like when a hotel receptionist asked me during a recent trip why I was in town, and I told her, and we had a conversation about the challenges of supporting our elderly parents in a broken healthcare system. Or when I picked up a Thanksgiving turkey from the Allentown farmers’ market (which is a simply awesome market) and the people there asked me how I was planning to roast it, and I told them, spatchcock, and they volunteered to do the spatchcocking for me in the friendliest possible way.
During the February visit to my mom’s, my daughter was with me, and she brought her dog, who is a large yearling with puppy-ish energy. We decided to burn off some of his energy in a nearby dog park, which was quite close to the high school I attended. There were two other people in the dog park who invited us to join them in the small dog section, since it was less muddy than the large dog section (it was still pretty muddy) and those two people could not have been nicer. And afterwards, my daughter (who works in political finance) and I confessed to each other that during the whole time we were chatting with those two people, we were both appreciating how nice they were, and we were also wondering whether they had voted for Trump.
I can’t stop thinking about that dog park encounter. It bothers me so much that I could not take what felt like a genuinely nice and sincere encounter at face value. Instead, I harbored suspicious, negative thoughts about them. It made me realize that I have succumbed to the epidemic of divisiveness that is sickening and weakening our country. I am infected with an us versus them, the other side sucks, let’s eradicate them type of mentality.
There has been much written and said – not all of it sound – on why we are so divided as a country. I used to hope, when they first appeared on our horizons, that social media platforms held the promise of strengthening connections among us. And to be fair, they often do – we find connection through so many things, like food and nature and loving animals – but in the hands of bad actors, social media also has the effect of sending us into our little boxing ring corners and whipping us up into a frenzy of frustration, fear, and anger. Putin ran a very well-orchestrated PR campaign to exploit these cultural fissures in our society for his (and Trump’s) gain. (This was very well-documented in the Mueller report, which was in turn thoroughly broken down by Lawfare.) People on the right somehow got very heated about pronouns and wokeness and DEI and the price of eggs. And for those of us who care about justice and equity and progress, well, we fell a little short when it came to making these concepts live and breathe in the real world, for too few people. Many of us tried, believe me, but we were battling against mighty headwinds, which were fueled even more by Russia and Fox News. While history teaches us that good can eventually prevail, history also teaches us that bad actors can chug along for quite a while, gather a ton of followers, and do unspeakable harm in the interim.
I don’t know how we are going to cure ourselves of this epidemic of divisiveness. I don’t have a blueprint that will show the exact path to how we will emerge from our little isolated corners, shake off the poison of mistrust and suspicion of and begin, individually and collectively, to do the painstaking work of strengthening the connections we have left to each other and opening the door for more people to join us in the work of making this country stronger. But oh my god, do I want us to start trying! I want more of us to acknowledge that we have work to do to live up to our actual name: the United States of America.
Being a communications professional, you might think that I have some ideas about how to message and campaign our way out of the current state of affairs. I’m afraid that I don’t have anything super-specific to suggest, which is why I’ve been reluctantly wrestling with this piece – and my feelings – for weeks. But I do know what I would like to see and hear when it comes to any messages or communications I either receive or am involved in developing.
ONE: I want to see an acknowledgement of people’s pain, fear, and anger about what’s happening but I want to hear this acknowledgement couched in such a way that everyone’s feelings matter. While I admit to taking a little bit of satisfaction in the #FAFO and leopard-face-eating discourse, I can’t see anything but more divisiveness and conflict resulting from it. We need to stop finding temporary salves for our feelings and actually, you know, deal with them and move on. I know this won’t be easy but endlessly gloating about people who voted for Trump who now regret it or are suffering the consequences doesn’t get us anywhere.
TWO: I need our leaders to coalesce around a few critical concepts and ideas that rise ABOVE specific issues. Almost all of the communications I’m receiving these days – donation requests for elections, job opportunities, articles, newsletters, posts – either don’t mention the current state of affairs in our country at all or focus on a single issue or blather about fighting back and resisting without giving many details of what, actually, is happening. As a result, I’m getting absolutely bombarded with emails telling me that the economy/democracy/misinformation/jobs/immigration/education/climate change/conservation/reproduction rights/voting rights/healthcare are THE single most important thing I should care about, which is why I should give money or get involved IMMEDIATELY.
Everything about the practices of messaging and outreach tell you to be hyper-focused on getting the message about your thing across. You can’t, in other words, communicate about everything, because then people will retain nothing. So I get why organizations are still carrying out their usual communications practices – they are carrying on with their jobs. But I can’t stress this enough: the sum total of everyone’s communications is MAKING THINGS SO MUCH WORSE RIGHT NOW. For those of us who actually care about human life and rights and justice and equity, what we are experiencing right now, in this 24/7 online echo chamber, feels like getting bombed by missiles after we’ve just been flattened by a nuclear bomb.
I would ask every single communicator working on behalf of an organization, every single content creator, every single journalist, every single politician, just EVERYONE: check your goddamn tone in what you put out there. Communicate about your specific issue, sure, but your messages should all roll up to some fundamental values that we all SHARE. (pssstt: Anger is not a value.) And also, please, please let us know that you are not an island. I want to know that you are working with others – it is not just about YOU, or your life, or your organization. Many of the case studies I worked on in the last several years involved how people came together, in response to the simultaneous crises of a global pandemic and horrific acts of racial injustice, to build alliances and communities and learn how to move forward, together. (This was a particularly inspiring example – a small but absolutely mighty advocacy organization in Massachusetts that brought together disparate stakeholders in the early childhood education space during the pandemic to galvanize and move the field forward together.)
Why, I ask you, did we prove to be so resilient and community-minded during those particular crises but are sounding so disorganized and ass-backwards during this one? I don’t know. Maybe the stories of resilience and coming-together are happening, but have yet to be documented and shared. Maybe we are feeling more anger and fatigue than we were back in 2020 – maybe it’s a cumulative effect. Either way, we are staying isolated in our little corners of our worlds for much longer than we should.
Anyway. I consume an awful lot of content, although I’ve cut back recently for obvious mental health reasons, and it has been difficult, finding stuff to read and watch and listen to that doesn’t skew TOO closely to our current horrific reality, but also isn’t TOO much of a fantasy that I feel guilty about burying my head in the sand to avoid the latest awful headline. In other words, I want reality, but not reality that will send me too far away from the world I know and want to love, again. One podcast that has hit the sweet spot for me between those two poles is The Telepathy Tapes, which is all about whether humans can communicate without actually speaking to one another. Telepathic abilities have been studied in animals, and also in humans, but such studies often run up against a brick wall of skepticism, especially in scientific fields that tend to emphasize materialism over phenomena or hypotheses we have yet to fully understand.
Most of the episodes have focused on how telepathic abilities often came to light with respect to nonverbal autistic kids – who, once they were able to access spelling/typing devices, showed an astonishing ability to read the thoughts of other people. The people and stories featured in the podcast are absolutely mind-blowing. But I’m not here to convince you that telepathy is real. I wanted to share what I found so incredibly moving about the stories of these families, with their non-verbal autistic family members. For decades, educators and so-called experts and many others dismissed non-verbal autistic kids as not competent – they assumed that because they lacked the ability to communicate in the same ways that most of us do, they simply weren’t “in there.” (“There,” meaning, there wasn’t an actual individual existing in their bodies.) But once these families were able to find a bridge to their kids’ minds – often through spelling or talking devices, and sometimes even through dreams! – they realized the astonishing complexity and richness and wholeness of their kids’ personalities and characters. Some of them are gifted musicians. Some of them know several languages. And almost all of them display the ability to connect telepathically to others – most often to a close family member, but sometimes to a whole group of other non-verbal autistic people who have created a shared meeting space where many of them connect – solely through their minds.
Again, I’m not trying to convince anyone that telepathy is real or not real. But I tell you, what moved me unbearably about the stories featured in The Telepathy Tapes was the realization of how painfully isolated these individuals must have felt, all of those years when they were unable to communicate in exactly the same ways that the rest of have prescribed as acceptable modes of discourse. And how incredible they and their family members must have felt when they were finally able to express themselves, and connect to new people, and show how astonishingly knowledgeable and connected they are. I long for such a release from the isolation and disconnection I am feeling from so many others in this country – even from those who, supposedly, espouse the same social and political opinions I do.
My final take-away from The Telepathy Tapes was the insight that telepathy doesn’t work for everyone – most of us, in order to function in our world, have built up too many cognitive and emotional boundaries to “hear” and access other people’s thoughts. Telepathy works best when someone believes it can happen, in other words. So this is my final thought: somehow, we have to believe that we can come together and make good things happen. I am struggling with that, at the moment. But I wrote a piece long ago about how maybe, just maybe, belief comes from practice: maybe we need to re-engage in the practices of hope and finding community and alliance, once again.
Minna Jung Consulting 