Readers of this column know I spend a lot of time thinking about how to bridge the political divide and bring people together. This past week I was presented with two sharply different approaches to that work. Or were they?
First, Daniel Lubetsky, CEO of Kind Snacks, who has put action behind the work of fostering respectful disagreement and positive connection for years, gave a TED talk last week, a summary of which landed in my inbox. It echoed many themes I had heard him speak of at a conference I attended in Dallas last year. I didn’t know of Lubetsky before that appearance but wow, what a hopeful model of leadership he presented. I was hooked.
In Dallas, Lubetsky told the origin stories spurring his work, both involving his father, Roman, whose life – and human spirit – were saved twice during the Holocaust by horrible human beings. Yes, horrible human beings.
His father’s family was living in a ghetto in Lithuania and the building’s superintendent was a Nazi sympathizer. Every morning, as Lubetsky described it, his grandfather would leave the building and greet the superintendent, treating him with kindness and respect that was not returned. When the Nazis decided to slaughter every Jew in the building, the superintendent cheered them on, even telling Roman to lick the bodies in the pile of murdered Jews as if they and he were animals. Yet, when the soldiers turned to Lubetsky’s family, the superintendent asked that they be spared. Had the grandfather’s humanity somehow connected to a buried sense of empathy in the superintendent?
Daniel Lubetsky went on to tell the audience that his grandfather and father were then sent to Dachau where beatings and starvation left Roman emaciated. Years later, after the family had emigrated to Mexico, Roman told a young Daniel about a life-changing day there when a German soldier glanced at him by a fence, barely able to stand. When he was sure no one was watching, the soldier threw a potato at Roman’s feet. This act of kindness, as Lubetsky described it, was fundamental to his father not only surviving the horrors of the Holocaust but to being able to hold on to a holistic view of humanity, one that contemplated both evil and goodness, despite the trauma of deeply bearing the former.
This survival story ended with a battalion of Japanese-American soldiers coming across the Lubetskys along with thousands of other prisoners abandoned by their captors during a death march that got waylaid by a blizzard. In his Dallas talk, Lubetsky quickly connected the dots between these liberators’ and the plight of the prisoners, because at the time the soldiers’ own families were having their liberty taken away in U.S. internment camps.
Is it any wonder that Lubetsky internalized these stories into a passion for building human connection, in his case through entrepreneurship?
In his TED talk, Lubetsky urged the audience to adopt the mindset of a “builder,” someone who “takes action to unite, to create and to bring light to the world,” rather than a “destroyer,” someone who “takes action to divide, demolish and diminish.”
“We’re going to be more effective in advancing our causes once we frame things differently,” Lubetsky said. “Instead of us versus them, what if we understood it as all of us versus extremism?”
“Yes,” I wanted to shout from my desk. That’s exactly it. Come together against extremism in all its forms, on the left and the right, and we can heal the world.
Not so fast. Another person who has spent the past two decades illuminating the connections between all of us, posed this question almost simultaneously, though unrelated to Lubetsky’s talk, on LinkedIn: “I heard a radio interview from an organization seeking to resolve the (often violent) #PoliticalDivide,” Nic Askew, a noted filmmaker, wrote. “It is noble work that makes a difference. But I do have an idea that it is missing a crucial piece, and that is our capacity to meet another beyond all ideas of them.”
Askew continued, “I am not certain that we can entirely fix any divide in the realm of ideas and understanding, as this is where the divide was caused in the first place.”
Askew referenced Rumi, the 13th-century poet and philosopher, who wrote a timeless call to human connection that in part reads, “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”
There is a field. I’ll meet you there. I picture the field like the small meadow that was at the end of the street I grew up on, the tall grass the color of straw, harboring tiny, wild red strawberry plants. Would a meeting there be silent? Soul to soul? No need for argument or examples to persuade, or even expressions of empathy?
I understand the point Askew is making. If we could see each other first as fellow humans, before any ideas or ideologies get in the way, we could connect on a more fundamental level.
And just maybe, it was in that field that the superintendent and the Nazi soldier recognized their common humanity in the Lubetskys.
Perhaps the two approaches aren’t so different after all. Let’s meet in the field, and build from there.
President of the Marblehead Current’s board of directors, Virginia Buckingham is the former chief executive officer of the Massachusetts Port Authority, chief of staff to two Massachusetts governors, deputy editorial page editor for the Boston Herald and author of “On My Watch: A Memoir.”
