A Welcoming Place for All
We need to invite many people to become part of our Communities who do not yet agree with taking action on climate change. People with political affiliations that are barely represented in our Communities need to be made welcome.
Where I live (in the rural eastern United States) the phase “human-caused climate change” has been turned into a political “code word” and is being used to divide people and shut down conversation, thinking, and connection.
Rural communities that have voted overwhelmingly for conservative policies and politicians (including Donald Trump) include our family members, neighbors, and coworkers.
In a recent leaders’ class we realized that almost all of our RC leaders are no more than a generation removed from rural working-class and/or poor families who had conservative political perspectives. The RC leaders, or their parents, went to college, moved away from their families of origin, and so on. We need to do more discharging about how we have been separated from so many of the people we have loved, lived near, or worked with.
Groton, New York, USA
Reprinted from the RC e-mail discussion
lists for RC Community members and
for leaders of wide world change