It’s Summer of 2024 and that means it’s the season of polarization. There’s five months left until a heated presidential election. And just four weeks until the Democratic and Republican National Conventions begin.

As in most presidential elections, we’re being offered a binary choice in a non-binary world: red or blue (no disrespect to independent candidates.) It’s a season when politics can be triggering and many of us choose to dodge conversations to avoid stressing and risking familial, business and social relationships.

In this season, I was especially happy to receive an email from a new group called Starts With Us, supported by best-selling author and organizational psychologist Adam Grant. “Our movement is founded on the beliefs that diversity of thought is a strength that leads to our most innovative ideas and that we must cooperate across our differences to solve the most pressing societal challenges of our time.”

According to Starts With Us, many people who are provoked seek to retaliate, and retaliatory acts can give a perverse form of pleasure, which scientists say can become addicting. Perhaps that’s why today we see abundant “Karen” videos depicting conflicts among strangers that generate millions of views.

Starts With Us also shared an important ad. Apparently, Stanford University researchers in 2021 asked researchers and organizations to submit “interventions” such as videos and quizzes that might be effective in reducing political animosity and strengthening commitment to democratic principles. After studying reactions to the more than 250 submissions they received, an intervention that involved watching a beer ad proved most effective. Watch it here.

The submitter, Undue Hate author Daniel F. Stone, offered an explanation for its power. “The ad was an excellent demonstration of contact theory — that when people have interpersonal contact with people from other social groups, prejudice and hostility tend to dissipate, especially when there are clear common goals. The people in the video have strong and conflicting political views and end up growing to truly like each other, reminding us that we probably would like plenty of people out there who have very different political views from our own if we got to know them.”

Stone’s comments reminded me of the experience I had after the lean finely textured beef controversy of 2012. I had been quoted widely — and my phone number was readily available as a “media contact line.” I began receiving texts and voice mails telling me I was a horrible person, a bad mother, and that it must be difficult to look at myself in the mirror. One particularly hateful note came in at midnight on a Friday night and I happened to be awake. I took a counterintuitive approach: I wrote an apology. I said I was very sorry because I must have delivered a confusing message somewhere that had upset him. I said I’d appreciate the chance to explain and that I was available at that very moment to speak.

He wrote back that he had an early soccer game with his son and that he had to hit the hay, but he thanked me for replying. I said I was very familiar with those early morning soccer games and wished his son luck. I asked him to call at this convenience. He thanked me. He never called, but I choose to believe that somehow I gave him some food for thought. I made it harder for him to hate me because he learned there was a human at the other end of the text — a mother — who was willing to listen.

The meat industry and its members aren’t political organizations, per se. But we certainly experience hostility and anger from those who don’t want us to use animals for food or who believe that people would be better off without meat in their diets. Could we find common ground if we looked and listened hard enough?

Can we use this season of polarization as a laboratory to learn how to engage those unlike ourselves, to find some threat of common ground, to put a human face on what may seem like a faceless industry? It’s possible we won’t succeed, but given the state of polarization in America, what have we got to lose?

Have a Heineken with your double serving of polarizing conversation

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