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NPR host: Words, civility matter in quest to change world
YOUNGSTOWN
Youngstown has long had problems with poverty and racism, but there could be an answer in handling them in a different way.
Krista Tippett, National Public Radio host of “On Being,” a show that explores the mysteries of human existence, spoke to a crowd of about 400 people at St. John’s Episcopal Church on Friday evening.
Tippett is a Peabody Award-winning broadcaster and a New York Times bestselling author. In 2014, she received the National Humanities Medal at the White House for “thoughtfully delving into the mysteries of human existence,” according to a biography provided by the church and WYSU, who were partners in bringing her to Youngstown.
The speech was part of her promotion for her “Civil Conversations Project,” a podcast that features speakers debating social issues.
It’s the way those issues are debated, however, Tippett says, that communities throughout the country, including Youngstown, can find useful as they try to mend their own problems.
Civility, she told the crowd, is an adventure, even though it has connotations of tameness and politeness.
She said that the questions such as when life begins, when death happens, how humans relate to one another and the nature of the world are not easily answered by the old ways any more.
“What is an economy, a school, a church?” she said, explaining that our social institutions have changed.
She said the “Civil Conversations Project” started in 2010 in the elections season, then after the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, there were calls for “moral imagination and civil healing.”
“So many of us resonated with those longings and had no idea how to make those things real” she said.
“We must decide what they look like, what they sound like and what they look like embodied.”
She said she had three statements of encouragement to make. The first one: “Words matter.”
They are the basis, she said, for how we understand ourselves, interpret the world and treat others.
In the 1960s, she continued, our country experienced genuine cultural diversity and we learned the “virtue of tolerance.”
But tolerance isn’t big enough, she said, from a human and spiritual perspective.
It’s endurance, indulgence, thriving in an unfavorable environment, she said. “It doesn’t invite us to understand and be curious, to engage and be surprised by each other.”
“We are starved by fresh language to approach each other,” she said, adding that words that “shimmer and heal” are more desirable.
Second, Tippett encouraged her audience to “rediscover questions.
“In American civil life, we trade mostly in answers, or in competing answers,” she said. “A question is a powerful, powerful thing.”
“It’s hard to meet a combative question with anything but a combative answer,” she pointed out. “It’s hard to resist a generous question.”
She also said it’s possible to pursue answers based on the way a question is asked.
“We can refuse to have these same old impoverished black-and-white choices,” she said.
“Common life is not the same as common ground,” she continued, adding that people can be “on the same page” in understanding an issue while still disagreeing about it. In that way, she explained, it’s possible to move discussions forward.
The third encouragement for her audience, she said, is to realize the difficulty of “what we face, that we are beginning again and we start small.”
“How does seismic change happen?” she said. “It begins to happen in the human heart. Over time, there’s a movement. It’s a gradual process.”
Tippett took questions about issues concerning audience members.
On how to get people under 50 involved in protecting the environment:
“When we start generalizing about large groups of people, we don’t see the potential and energy that is there ... there is a real longing for a cross-generational relationship ... make real flesh and blood connections.”
On how to focus on solving a problem: “It’s about repairing the part of the world that you can see and touch.”
On what Youngstown can do to solve its most pressing problems: “As a project, we would like to be your conversation partner.”
On how to talk about race and who are Youngstown’s partners: “Start to think about race as a human body, then race becomes a matter of belonging. ... I can’t know who are the leaders here and how do we get them in place.”