The Kyle Report

The Kyle Report

Monday, January 25, 2021

“Dialog” seeks to promote understanding

Part of the brilliance, at least to me, of Lawrence Wright’s Pulitzer Prize winning The Looming Tower is that the reader can learn to understand what led to Al Qaeda’s decision to attack America. I, for one, could not agree with that reasoning that motivated the attacks, but I could understand and accept why the terrorists saw these reasons as valid.

That type of understanding is one of the rewards of learning from reading. Writing doesn’t promote understanding, but reading can. The same is true with the spoken word. Talking, especially in these divisive times, does little to nothing to promote acceptance. But listening? Listening comprehensively can reveal the pathway that leads to empathy.

That belief, I’m pretty sure, is a large part of the motivation behind City Council member Dex Ellison’s drive to stage what he calls “A Dialog for Peace and Progress,” a program that will be an integral part of the city’s recognition of February as Black History Month. This will be the second of such forums Ellison has presented and this planned 90-minute program is scheduled for 7 p.m. Feb. 5. It will be hosted from the City Council chambers, and will feature panelists who will participate both in-person and remotely. A mask-wearing, socially distanced audience will be able to attend the forum, but it will also be available for remote viewing on the city’s Facebook page, its You Tube channel and on Spectrum Cable channel 10. One can hope a video of the event will be posted and enshrined on the city’s web page immediately upon the program’s conclusion,

In addition to Ellison, who will serve as the forum’s moderator, other scheduled participants include Mayor Travis Mitchell; Vanessa Westbrook, a member of the Hays Historical Commission; Jonnie Wilson, a community counselor at the Hays Caldwell Women’s Center; Grace Castenada, a third grade teacher at Negley Elementary School; and Aaron Taylor, a recent graduate of Hays High School and currently a student at the University of Texas at Austin. More participants are likely to be added between now and Feb. 5.

“The purpose of the Dialog for Peace and Progress is to see that we are all individuals in a collective community,” Ellison told me last week. “And unless we talk to each other and give each other an opportunity to share how we feel, what our perspectives are that have led us to where we are in our points of life and give that other person that fair shake to do that same thing, all the other things with political rhetoric isn’t going to get us anywhere.”

Ellison’s first Dialog for Peace and Progress took place last year, not coincidentally on June 19, a little more than three weeks after the beginning of the nationwide Black Lives Matters protests stemming from the death of George Floyd. It, too, was scheduled for 90 minutes but turned out to last twice as long. “It clearly showed this was something of interest to our community,” Ellison said.

The idea for the forum, he said, came about as the result of conversations he was having with others in the wake of Floyd’s death. He said he felt progress was made as a result of those talks. Conversations, he realized, “are where we see each other again. That is where people have an understanding.

“So I thought ‘How do I duplicate that to the city?’ So this idea of putting a panel together came to me. I wanted to get a diverse panel last summer and we had a very unique, diverse and insightful panel that really made for a great discussion. And ever since that happened we’ve been asked 'When’s the next one?'. So I knew it was something the community wanted to see more of.”

Ellison said that although Black History Month will be the focus of the next Dialog’s discussion, he hopes it will also be a continuation of the conversations held last Juneteenth.

“It’s designed for folks in our community to hear from members of that community that they were unaware of, perspectives they were unaware of or maybe had not heard before,” he said. “So that in large part what we hope to achieve with this. That is our ultimate goal.”

Ellison said he recognizes the hard-line divisions that exist in the country and attributes much of it to social media and looks at his Dialog for Peace and Progress as an antidote to Facebook, Twitter, etc.

“What I’ve found is when you get people off of social media and when you talk to them face-to-face there’s a more direct conversation, the old-school way of having conversations,” he said. “Then you sell people who will listen. You will see people who will have a conversation that is much more civil when it is in person. The idea of being in person makes it much tougher to be so hard-headed or so staunch in their view whatever those views may be. You can shut people out when you’re on a social media platform, but when it becomes face-to-face there is common ground that can be found most of the time.”

He also said he recognizes that there are those so locked in their beliefs they are not even willing to listen to another point of view.

“You can’t force someone to sit down and listen to you or take the time to watch the forum,” he said. “But the goal of it is that people who are watching in their homes will have a conversation with their families, will have a conversation with their neighbors, with those they go to church with and that’s how it starts. It’s just putting that thought in the minds of people that these are not talking heads from Washington or the media or even from the state capital, but that these are people from right here in this city and that shines a different light on it. It makes it real for people. It shows them that this is not something that’s out there in a different part of the state or the country.

“It’s a gradual process,” the council member told me. “It won’t happen with one or two or three or four Dialogs for Peace and Progress. But I think it’s a step in the right direction to show that when you have a conversation or when you take the opportunity to sit down and take time to listen and have others listen to you that’s how you make progress. That’s the goal and I’m very optimistic about it.”

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