Braver Angels

Within days of Charlie Kirk’s murder in September, I received an invitation to join a Red-Blue traveling tour across Utah with Braver Angels, an organization committed to bridging the partisan divide. The purpose was to conduct workshops on immigration, find common ground among people who normally disagree, and teach cross-partisan communication skills to local elected officials. Given the atmosphere following Kirk’s murder, where people from the President on down were blaming the “radical lunatic left,” I was nervous about entering the fray. Folks, including my therapist, dance partners, and friends, were worried about my safety. Yet I was intrigued. By the time I got on the plane in November, tempers had cooled, and I felt somewhat reassured that I would return in one piece.

Braver Angels, like Noah’s ark, tries to bring everyone on in twos: a Red for every Blue and vice versa. However, given that Utah is such a Red state, by the time my ticket was paid, there was only one other Blue on the team of six. Then, she got into a serious car accident. So it was just me, the only Jew and only progressive amongst a group of conservative, predominantly Latter-Day Saint activists. Everyone recognized the disparity, and we talked about it, and just about everything else as we crossed the state in our rented RV, like a rock band, rolling into town and putting on a political workshop. The venues were firehouses, churches, and community centers. We filled the walls with flip charts and got down to the serious business of forging unanimous points of agreement on immigration.

The main reason I was on the tour was that I had created the Common Ground Workshop for Braver Angels way back in 2019, when a group of rural Oregonians asked me to find a way for them to discuss abortion. The topic was a tense one in this community, in part because an outside organization came to the town square weekly to demonstrate with blown-up pictures of fetuses in utero. The topic was so sensitive that, for security reasons, they didn’t announce it publicly.

As I thought about how to lead the abortion workshop, I harkened back to an exercise I had created during the first intifada at a meeting of American Jewish and Palestinian women leaders. We split up into two rooms – one with Jews and one with Palestinians. Each side was instructed to propose points they could agree on, and there was a chance the other side would accept them as well. Everyone had a veto, so no one was forced to bend themselves into a pretzel for the good of the group. Coming out of that exercise, ten points of unanimous agreement were reached, including the need for a two-state solution and mutual recognition between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples. These ten points served as the basis for public speaking engagements in which a Jew and a Palestinian addressed audiences in synagogues, Arab community groups, churches, and universities.

I took that exercise successfully into the workshop on abortion and subsequent Braver Angels workshops on a range of issues - gun violence, climate change, trustworthy elections, and more, teaching a cadre of moderators around the country to conduct the workshop both in person and online. What I hadn’t foreseen was the power of conducting workshops on the same issue all over the country. The workshops we were holding on immigration in Utah, moderated by me and one of the organization’s co-founders, David Lapp, were part of a national campaign. The Points of Agreement that appear across multiple workshops will inform a report to the nation on how Reds and Blues can agree on ways to fix the immigration system, busting through the myth that there is no way for folks to come together on this issue. It will be a man-bites-dog story.

The workshops in Utah were intense. In one workshop, the first to speak was a young Latino man from an immigrant family who said that his stepfather was deported that week, and that his father was in Mexico after being deported ten years ago. Other Blues told heartbreaking stories they had seen up close – an Afghan refugee family that couldn’t find a country that would take them in, an immigrant struggling to get a green card, and if they didn’t catch it on a particular post office delivery day, their entire application would be in jeopardy.

The Reds also had stories to tell. A working-class man who worked on a ranch had to give up his painting business because he was outbid by businesses using undocumented workers who were not paid at the same rate as U.S. citizens. A local politician who was in the corporate world talked about how businesses abused undocumented workers and that their arrival in the country became an opportunity for exploitation.

I worried about how they would bridge these painful differences. Yet when they came together to debrief what they had heard, the guy whose step-dad had just been deported reached across to the others and pointed out that they all had a desire for people to be treated more humanely. The workshop went superbly after that. They reached agreements to increase legal immigration, secure the border, allow DACA recipients to become citizens, and create a path to legal status for undocumented immigrants who had been here lawfully for many years.

There were disappointments, too. In both Common Ground workshops, participants could not reach any agreements on the role of ICE. In one case, a Red participant said he thought ICE officers needed to be masked and unbadged, or they would be doxed and harassed. But one Red participant disagreed, saying they were police and needed to be transparent and accountable to the public. Another Red wasn’t convinced that ICE agents were untrained or that too much money was being spent on their budget. As a facilitator, I am committed to neutrality regarding the issue. But inside, I felt turmoil.

Nonetheless, the workshop participants found many points of agreement and plan to have a constituent conversation with their Congressional Rep to share them. Judy Woodruff of PBS attended one of these meetings in rural Ohio and recently featured it on PBS Newshour.

On the RV, our staff conversations were frank. I shared my perspective that authoritarians always find a segment of the population to demonize, an essential part of their playbook. Trump was going after immigrants because it fulfills his overall strategy to divide us and exert control. I read out loud an email I received from my neighborhood listserv in Takoma Park, Maryland, about how, that day, undocumented city workers were harassed and chased around town by ICE agents. I think I had a different lived experience, and they listened.

I asked them why they feel so defeated when the Right controls all three branches of government. They said that they were losing in the culture, pointing to Hollywood, universities, the media, and the art world. I tried to imagine what that was like from their perspective. I imagined being besieged and lonely.

One issue about which there was no daylight between them and I was the Epstein files, and none of us would be surprised if Trump was implicated. Some of them had voted for him, but held their noses. They too longed for his disappearance from the political scene.

The truth is that the best part of the trip was the friendships on the RV. We had fun together – eating junk food, including gas-station hot dogs, laughing about nothing much, and repeatedly going out for ice cream late at night. Most of the others were in their thirties, and even they said they felt like teenagers again. I noticed, as we took in the sights of Utah, that everywhere you turn, you see the Rocky Mountains. We visited the majestic Zion National Park on a rainy day and saw the outstanding Roots of Knowledge stained glass exhibit, tracing the history of the world in colorful images at Utah Valley University, where Charlie Kirk was murdered.

Yet my best memory was on the last night, when we had a four-hour drive back to Salt Lake City. Barreling through the dark on the highway, we began to sing together. First, the LDS folks sang a Mormon children’s song. Then my friend David, who grew up in Amish Pennsylvania, taught us a haunting chant he learned in church. I sang “Hinei Ma Tov” (how good it is to sit together) and taught them “Peace, Salaam, Shalom.” Our voices almost harmonized.

When I got home to Maryland, it took me days to get out of that Utah RV. Slowly, I find myself putting back on the garment of anger and fear as I take in the constant stream of disturbing news. What I miss most is hanging that up for just one week.

Reena Bernards

Reena Bernards, activist, family therapist, writer, dancer, lives in Takoma Park, Maryland with her husband, Tom Smerling.

PBS coverage here

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/in-ohio-a-bipartisan-community-group-seeks-common-ground-on-immigration-reform?link_id=0&can_id=8ebf4cae024350b83353ecab366425b2&source=email-courageous-citizenship&email_referrer=email_3000776&email_subject=braver-angels-was-featured-on-pbs-newshour