Start Making Sense: How To Talk To America

Editor's Note: The following is Part II in a series of transcripts taken from a standing-room-only book panel in San Francisco for AlterNet's new book, Start Making Sense: Turning the Lessons of Election 2004 into Winning Progressive Politics. Already in its second printing, SMS brings together some of the best-known progressive thinkers and doers to map out a realistic plan for building a new movement for change in this country.

The panel included Van Jones (executive director of Ella Baker Center for Human Rights), George Lakoff (linguist and best-selling author), Wes Boyd (co-founder of MoveOn.org), Adam Werbach (executive director of Common Assets Defense Fund), Lakshmi Chaudhry (senior editor of AlterNet) and moderator Holly Minch (director of the Spin Project).

PART II

Holly Minch: Thank you very much for joining us to celebrate the release of the book this evening. And our hope with the panel is to really explore many of the same themes that emerged in the book. Sort of 'what happened, what do we do about it and what do we find when we look to the future?' So those will be some of the questions I will be posing to the panel....

... I would like to pick up this thread about not just being a thorn in the side of the establishment but becoming the establishment; becoming a force of people, a community that is able to speak to the middle, that is able to speak to a much broader swath of Americans than we have been able to do and I want to ask that question in the context of the culture of increasing polarization in this country.

You know, coming out of the election we had a sort of either/or dynamic set up in this country; red states, blue states; hawks/doves and never the two shall meet. So, how do we in that context of increasing political polarization and how do we in particular, those of us who dwell in the liberal oasis of the Bay Area, learn to break out of that and learn to communicate with and listen to and connect with Republicans from a place of deep respect? How do we learn to connect with the part of the country that we have not been connecting with to date? [Applause]

Van Jones: How many people in this room were born and raised in San Francisco? How many people were born and raised in California? So, I wasn't. And I want to say something about this. First of all I think that the left in our country, we almost have gone through a process where we got a divorce from our own country. For me I grew up in the middle of the country. I'm from Tennessee. I'm a Southerner; red state. I got my feelings hurt really bad growing up. I was not in the big clique. I was a nerd. I was sensitive and I left as soon as I could. And I fled like a lot of people in the left strong holds. I fled to the cosmopolitan coasts where I felt like I could belong. And I joined some of the subcultures on the cosmopolitan coasts that felt more welcoming to me. And I was able to find my place and find my voice in doing that.

But something atrophied in me that showed up around the Thanksgiving table. And I suddenly discovered that I could not talk or communicate or be heard by people I had literally grown up with. I went back to neighborhoods and churches that I literally had grown up in and when I would talk the room, it would freeze. People would squirm uncomfortably and when I finished five to ten minutes later some relative, out of pure kindness, sympathy and compassion would say, "Well now, that was a mouthful. Boy can you pass the ketchup?" And the conversation would move on.

We don't have to ask the question how do we learn to talk to America. We have to ask the question when did we make the choice to forget? What was the injury? What is the pain? How long are we going to let being-bullied-in-high-school run our lives and run our movement? [Applause] This is a question.