Maricor Coquia came to the post-election dialogue at Regis University on Wednesday afternoon depressed and confused — even though her choice for president had won.
“Last night my classmates were accusing me of supporting ‘Barack Hussein,’ ” she told the group that had gathered in the student union.
Their mission: try to find unity after the bitterly divisive campaign.
Regis University is at the forefront of a movement that’s working to promote civil dialogue and common ground among people with very different views.
Denver already has held forums on race, religion and politics using everything from electronic town meetings to simple community forums. Early next year, the first Transpartisan National Convention will be held here. And organizations that have taken baby steps over the past few years to improve the quality of discussion say they see their efforts expanding over the next few months.
Like Catholics nationwide, students at Regis University, a Catholic institution, found themselves divided over electoral issues. On Wednesday, it was up to facilitator Leilani Henry to get students, faculty and administrators to discuss the issues that have inflamed emotions on campus.
Coquia, who wants to be a doctor, explained she had few problems before the presidential campaign when she’d banter with fellow students. They’d say they wanted to be doctors to become rich. She’d argue that the point was to serve the sick with compassion.
“With the election, it became more about being Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal,” she said. “They said, ‘I want to keep my money, I’m a conservative, hard core.’ They would pin me down as really liberal, when in fact I grew up in a Republican household.”
When Coquia burst into tears as she shared her frustrations Wednesday, Jimmy Sengenberger leaned forward, brow furrowed with concern.
A conservative Republican who wears an American-flag pin on the collar of his blue-striped shirt, he adamantly disagrees with her politics but cares about her as a colleague — they work together on the university newspaper.
“We’re still Americans”
The raw impact of inflammatory words by his fellow Republicans on his Democratic co-worker prompted Sengenberger to suggest a campus forum of Republicans and Democrats to further their understanding of one another.
“No matter what we do, under the partisanship and polarization, we’re still Americans and we can come together to discuss issues cordially,” he said.
Part of a new wave of experts trained in finding common ground, Henry started her Conifer-based company, Being & Living Enterprises, to teach the techniques of dialogue: Practice restraint and suspend judgment, rather than fall for the cable-television style of debate and attack.
“We need to communicate in a way that we don’t pounce or put down, but that cultivates a deep listening,” she said.
“People have a lot of anger about this election, and I work with their anger.”
Paul Alexander, who heads the Institute on the Common Good at Regis University, has noticed a post-election yearning to knit together a polarized society.
The morning after Barack Obama was elected, Alexander attended a meeting of the Greater Denver Interfaith Alliance.
“The imams, rabbis and priests were talking about how we move forward on this,” he said. “Not talking Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, but healing the divides.”
Topics such as Israel came up, Alexander said, “so it’s going be difficult. But we have to make the effort and build the relationships.”
To make that happen, people in religious and political communities are getting trained in some of the new techniques and technologies meant to aid discussion, he said.
Real dialogue, which started in ancient Greece, now boasts tools that range from online curriculum to electronic town-hall meetings that combine technology with face-to-face dialogue.
In those electronic town halls, people gather at a central location or satellite locations. They talk but can also enter their opinion on a polling keypad that allows for anonymity, and then flashes the results instantly across all screens.
The process was used last year in Gov. Bill Ritter’s statewide “Dialogue on Health Care Vision and Values.”
Such technological progress in bridge-building was fueled by a decade of increased political polarization.
“It’s a shift in reaction to all this partisanship,” Alexander said. “People are hungry for resources and a new skill level.”
Upcoming dialogues
Even without fancy technology, places such as the Iliff School of Theology are finding ways to bring people together. This fall, Iliff held a series called “Faith, Race, and the Future of Democracy” that focused on building consensus in a multiracial democracy. About 100 people attended, and the school expects to hold future sessions in winter and spring.
“There was a deeper understanding of the common values and commitments that underlie the apparent differences of faith, color of skin, economic background and educational achievement,” Iliff president David Trickett said. “A number of people talked about carrying pieces of the conversation back into their places of work and worship, and their families.”
One of the local groups that supported the event was Elephant Talk, which plans to invite Denver residents to a series of dinner-table dialogues next spring. Topics will cross the boundaries of religion, culture, gender, age, ethnicity and economic classes.
Politics is off the table. “It’s the new religion,” co-founder Sandra Sommers said.
But politics will be the meat of the first Transpartisan National Conference, to be held in February. The idea is to forge a new political dialogue, one that respects all points of view, and to rebuild trust among Americans to discover a common purpose for the nation.
Over four days, voters and leaders — liberals, conservatives, Greens, libertarians — will talk about how to find common ground and what tools best transform conflict and power struggles.
Sengenberger, a political science major at Regis, finds such discussions helpful, even if minds are not easily changed.
After Wednesday’s post-election gathering, he had a good conversation with a couple of people with whom he’d intensely disagreed.
“We had a good, cordial discussion,” he said.
“I realized that despite the argumentative culture that we live in, there’s always the potential to sit down and have a dialogue where we express disagreement in a respectful fashion.”
Colleen O’Connor: 303-954-1083 or coconnor@denverpost.com
