Living Room Conversations: Transpartisan Dialogue to Overgrow the Partisan Trance with Joan Blades

“If we truly want peace in the Middle East, we must first have peace in the Middle West.” -- Swami Beyondananda

For decades, we’ve been exposed to the meme, “visualize world peace.” Well, maybe the key to transforming the world at large is to transform the “world at small” – a peace-building movement to bring together our red and blue tribes to sit in “sacred circle” and talk until they’re “purple in the face.”

That’s the approach this week’s guest, Joan Blades, is taking. The co-founder of MoveOn.org, known for its partisan alignment with the Democratic Party, she has spent the last decade building “Living Room Conversations” to bring parties from both parties into heart-opening, re-humanizing dialogue, which she describes as “respectful discourse across ideological, cultural and party lines, grassroots engagement around allowing people at the community level to really connect.”

In this conversation about seeing beyond the divide to recognize our shared values, Joan speaks of her involvement with MoveOn (which began, she says, as a transpartisan call to move beyond Bill Clinton’s impeachment), and the insights and influences that led her to co-found Living Room Conversations as a “listening practice to grow connection and understanding, a way to get in right relationship with those around us.”

She also discusses the obstacles to “trust” conversations, including the role of social media in deepening the gap between the two sides, citing last year’s documentary, The Social Dilemma. In response to the defensive question coming from both sides “Why would I want to talk to THEM?” Joan offers plenty of good reasons, including finding our way forward together as a society – or, as the Swami puts it, “Hey, let’s put the CIVIL back in civilization.”

You’ll find out why Living Room conversations work, how they create “safety” for participants, even as they discuss divisive issues, and hear success stories about how heart-to-heart connections have been made, and how these conversations have led to fruitful collaboration. In contrast to mainstream media and social network platforms that benefit from sowing the seeds of mistrust and separation, Living Room Conversations offers face-to-face communication to lift us off the political battlefield and onto the cooperative playing field – so left and right can come front and center to “face the music” and dance together.

Live transcript: https://otter.ai/u/_wXBMN40L18_6HkRPIig_2f0IO8

https://livingroomconversations.org/

Learn about and watch the documentary: Social Dilemma

https://www.thesocialdilemma.com/

https://youtu.be/uaaC57tcci0

Learn about and watch the Black Mirror series:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mirror

https://youtu.be/di6emt8_ie8