845: A Small Thing That Gives Me a Tiny Shred of Hope
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A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbpeeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. Okay, this isn't news to anybody. Our country is profoundly, cataclysmically divided, disagreeing about so many basic things. The COVID vaccine was the last election stolen, was January 6, an insurrection, or as they called it on Tucker Carlson Show, a grandma selfie party. It's two different visions of reality that seem doomed to never reconcile. And maybe this is an inappropriate comparison, but somehow this comes to mind for me. You know that thing in your personal life where you get into a serious fight with somebody who you really care about? And they see it one way, and you see it another way, and you're not seeing eye-to-eye. The best outcome, the thing you hope for, is that by talking it through and really listening to each other and trying to sort it out, in the end, you'll either see it the same way, you'll have the same story, or, this is almost as good, you won't agree on what happened, but at least you'll get where the other person's coming from, and they'll get where you're coming from, and neither really thinks the other's crazy, or has their intent. I just wish we could do that with our politics. I understand all the reasons why that's not happening. I understand how some people think, well, way beyond that, it's impossible, counterproductive, that's a bad idea, but just to say, I wish, I think lots of us wish that. Without that, and, you know, divided so evenly, nobody can predict the outcome of a presidential election without that, how are we going to keep functioning as a country? But who's trying to bridge that gap between Red America and Blue America, and bring us to a common story? I honestly can't name a half dozen people if I try, so whenever I hear of anybody attempting to do anything like that, and doing what seems like a decent job of it, I perk up, and I heard about somebody like that recently from somebody who used to work here at our show, Brian Reed. They did a story on this new podcast that he started with another former This American Life producer, Robin Simeon, Robin Producers the Show, Brian Hosett, and they did a story about somebody doing this, and Brian knows how I have kind of a "B" in my bonnet about this particular thing, and so he sent me a copy, and I am very excited to present a version of their story for you right now, because it gave me a glimpse, like a very tentative, first step kind of glimpse, and I know that's a mixed metaphor, but just whatever, a first stepped glimpse of the possibility that people in this country could listen to each other a little bit and look at the facts of something together and understand each other just maybe a little smudge better. We have some other stories in today's program, they are about couples managing their feelings during this heightened political moment, on the verge of all of us getting one president or another, one future or another, we're going to get to all that after the break from WB Easy Chicago, it's American Life, I'm Eric Glass, stay with us. It's American Life at 1, a tiny thing that gives me hope. Okay, so like I said before the break, this is a story about somebody trying to bridge the gap in the way that Red America and Blue America see the world, and like I said, it comes from this new podcast that Brian Reed is hosting called Question Everything, it's a podcast about journalism and the person trying to bridge the gap between the two Americas and the story is a journalist, and the story that they did on the podcast, they get to that guy in a little bit, but the story starts with a couple, Dick and Emily, who found themselves unhappily living on opposite sides of the Red Blue divide, when the first met decades ago, here's a Republican, she was, she says, a bleeding heart liberal, but it wasn't a big
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