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At book club last night (highly recommend Serviceberry) I had two realizations that feel important: 
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1) bridging ideas (library economies) are super important to helping people move toward change
https://brightgreenfutures.substack.com/p/episode-25-library-economies-and
2) we had a discussion about “making friends with the neighbors” vs. “making your friends into your neighbors (co-housing, buying out the neighborhood etc)” (latter is a real trend people yearn for; former is something we struggle with).
My neighborhood has many conservatives. My take: you’re not going to “make friends” w/ conservative neighbors without a lot of (probably fruitless) emotional labor on your side.
I see a lot of advocacy for this & I think it’s actually not the right approach...
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"Work harder to connect w/conservatives" seems like moralizing (we *should* do it) or wishful thinking (we *wish* it was possible).
It’s posed as a solution to the fact that people love fascism, as if they’ll turn away if you just do more hard work to convince them...
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@susankayequinn I live in a mixed rural village of progressives (a lot of tech folks who commute to a city 35 mins away) and a broad spectrum of Anabaptists (from more 'modern' Mennonite to Old Order/Amish etc.) Lots of religiosity, and some people certainly may hold "traditional" views but you will still see signs of support for all communities here. Perhaps it helps that many Mennonites are social justice oriented, I don't know. 1/2
@susankayequinn I'm on the local library board and I can tell you we do not get requests to remove books like in some places. You may not "win people over" exactly to your point of view, but if you can at least build a culture of mutual respect and tolerance hopefully leading to trust, it's a good start. 2/2
(she/her) @susankayequinn@wandering.shop@mark yes but did you "build a culture of mutual respect and tolerance" or did your neighbors already have that culture and the fact that you do not have book bans is a reflection of that? Did you actively go out and convince them to have mutual respect? Or tolerance? Or was that already present and you were part of that as well?
These are critical differences.
The hectoring is that it's the left-leaning people's job to create that culture when they are not the ones who destroyed it.
@susankayequinn Good questions. I think it's a bit of both, as I mentioned many Mennonites are social justice oriented, that likely helps, but the community itself through the library, ag society, township sponsored community events, etc. do bring people from different backgrounds together regularly (kids/family events etc.) so there is a lot of mixing and socializing.
It may also help that there are no folks actively stoking division.
@mark ah, so you've got infrastructure in place that brings people (physically) together, and I would agree strongly that's key to building the kind of culture you have
So if the argument was "liberals, go out and build more infrastructure to bring people together physically so the magic can happen!" I would agree strongly with that. But that's not what it's saying. (I'm speaking now of the vague hectoring) The argument is that we have to "reach out" more and that's just not how it works.