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Let’s leverage common ground

by Margaret E. Davis
| September 22, 2024 12:00 AM

When I moved to Kalispell a few years ago I visited a new friend’s house and saw that neighbors at the end of her street had hung a massive banner across their garage.  

The banner’s message can’t be printed here. The first word rhymed with “buck” and the second named a politician. 

It made me wonder whether parents in the neighborhood had to explain that language to their kids, language that wouldn’t go over well at many schools and dinner tables or pass muster with the Federal Communications Commission. 

I also wondered at its effectiveness.  

Maybe the people who hung the banner just need a hug. Still, if you want love (for your views, anyway), it helps to be lovable. 

If people need to be a vulgar bully to get attention, that can become the overriding point of the message. 

The good news in the report of a yearlong study by More in Common of 8,000-plus Americans suggests most people don’t engage in this kind of discourse, this indiscriminate shouting upon the land and online. Despite the amplified volume, most Americans aren’t into it, either in posting (or poster-ing) or being swayed by it.  

Recently I read a characterization of Montana voters as “contrarian.” We don’t like being told what to do. This state has had a long history of political rebels and independent voters.  

For example, in 1916, Montana sent the first woman to Congress, three years before the constitutional amendment passed that gave all American women the right to vote.  

According to that yearlong study, 23 percent of Americans said they feel hopeless about the ability to work together despite our differences; the other 77 percent agreed with the idea that “the differences between Americans are not so big that we cannot come together.”  

Conservative New York Times columnist David French recently summed up another finding in the report: “While the partisan 33 percent of America is engaged in the political equivalent of trench warfare, the exhausted 67 percent are tired of polarization, feel forgotten by the political parties and long for some degree of compromise.” 

Most people want to get along, and it’s harder to hate up close than from a keyboard. A natural way to come together is over common ground. 

Former Lakeside resident Becky Mattson may have had some of this in mind when she created National Good Neighbor Day in the early 1970s. 

The idea took off. President Jimmy Carter made it a national holiday in 1978. Proclamation 4601 for the occasion, later set for every Sept. 28, reads in part that “we are mindful that the noblest human concern is concern for others. Understanding, love and respect build cohesive families and communities ... this sense of community is nurtured and expressed in our neighborhoods where we give each other an opportunity to share and feel part of a larger family.” 

A quick internet search shows the holiday celebrated all over, with actions such as block parties, litter cleanups and simple high-fives. Missouri makes it a whole Good Neighbor Week.  

However we choose to mark the occasion this Saturday, it’s a chance to do less shouting and more chatting, especially over the fence. 

Margaret E. Davis, executive director of the Northwest Montana History Museum, can be reached at mdavis@dailyinterlake.com.