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As we rebelliously consider principles like respect + truth, we’re struck with how far away from common virtues we’ve drifted. What if we found our way back to them, improving the world while we do? We’re challenging Tallahassee to host or attend a Ben Franklin Circle. First 5 hosts receive 2 season tickets.
Throughout those battles, antidotes to our civic poisons have always run through the American bloodstream too. Americans have continually found ways to neutralize their discord and catalyze diversity, turning them into sources of strength.
Early legislators came to work “in the spirit of avowed misunderstanding, without the smallest wish to agree.” Jefferson’s solution? He invited diverse lawmakers to dinner and was widely credited with saving democracy. Maybe we can too?
As we rebelliously consider principles like respect + truth, we’re struck with how far away from common virtues we’ve drifted. What if we found our way back to them, improving the world while we do? We’re challenging Tallahassee to host or attend a Ben Franklin Circle. First 5 hosts receive 2 season tickets.
Universities have long been experienced as a place where the ideals of free inquiry and deliberative democracy are embodied – even as the paragon of these values. But in recent years, colleges across the nation have become front-page news for alarming instances of censoring voices and protests escalating when two ideas come into conflict.
Now fortified by the perfect electronic Pandora’s Box of social media platforms and weaponized from toxic chatrooms to The Kremlin, falsehoods are delivered to us with targeted precision by firehose. So what’s a country to do? We’ll ponder just how public discourse beats the profusion of propaganda.
Anger in service of a moral cause we believe in is righteous – easy to understand and forgive when it boils over. But when it’s the other team’s moral cause, it looks like an angry mob. Add siloed partisanship and no wonder why anger is escalating and people are afraid. We’ll aim for mutual understanding on left and right, before it’s too late.
You can feel the roiling forces of rebellion popping up from sea to shining sea, but what if in America the greatest act of rebellion might be to show each other a little respect? What if being neighbors with each other at a time like this is the most powerful form of rebellion?
