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Nonprofit seeks to bridge the political divide through meaningful conversation
Richmond, Virginia — Recent polling confirms what so many Americans feel, that the current political climate is dividing us. But an initiative from the nonprofit group StoryCorps seeks common ground through shared stories in an effort to bridge that divide.
In a recent conversation hosted by StoryCorps, two men from different generations and opposite ends of the political spectrum sat down for a chat.
“I grew up in a conservative Catholic family,” 29-year-old Patrick Kliebert told 66-year-old Gary Snead, who responded that he is a “dyed-in-the-wool liberal.”
Their conversation, part of what they call their One Small Step initiative, was overseen by StoryCorps’ Claire LeBlond.
“It involves taking a brave step, like one small step,” LeBlond tells CBS News.
The idea: in a world where people often never have to actually meet those they disagree with, face-to-face contact may be one of the only ways to get over that barrier.
“There are levels of contact, particularly repeated contact, that can slowly start to change people’s relationships to each other,” LeBlond said, explaining that it’s hard to hate someone you are in contact with.
“That’s what I hear a lot of participants find in their conversations,” LeBlond said.
Crucially, Snead and Kliebert were not there to debate. LeBlond says StoryCorps’ hosted conversations are “not about changing somebody’s mind” or “getting your point across.” They are here to learn that assumptions prevent us from seeing each other.
As a case-in-point, Snead, the self-described “dyed-in-the-wool liberal,” tells Kliebert that he’s a “staunch advocate of the Second Amendment.”
Kliebert, a conservative, says, “Honestly, I’ve come around on things like universal healthcare.”
They are also more than their politics. These two men discover they share the pain of loss
“We both belong to the club that no one should ever have to belong to,” Snead said.
StoryCorps says their One Small Step conversations are available for anyone, anywhere online who is open to the idea that disagreements don’t have to be dealbreakers.
Fifty minutes into heir conversation, Kliebert and Snead appear to have taken that one small step.
“I want to thank you for opening up about your son,” Kliebert tells Snead. “I’m grateful that we had the opportunity to talk about that.”
That comes as no surprise to LeBlond, who has conducted 198 of these conversations. She says she has never had a participant storm out of the room.
One of the few things Americans do agree on these days is just how divided we are. A CBS News poll released in March asked people to “give the state of the country” in a word. 61% of respondents chose “divided,” five times the number that chose “united.”
“That’s not the world I live in, where everybody is so divided and filled with contempt,” LeBlond said. “I live in a one small step world.”
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Pearl Jam is one of the world’s biggest, well-respected rock groups. Now, in a rare extensive interview with correspondent Anthony Mason, Eddie Vedder and bass player Jeff Ament open up about the band’s founding, being together for nearly 35 years, their latest album, and more for “CBS Sunday Morning,” to be broadcast Sunday, September 22 on CBS and streamed on Paramount+.
Mason caught up with Pearl Jam while on tour for a revealing, personal look, in which Vedder and Ament talk about their childhoods, making music together, their dedicated fan base, being on tour, growing older, and their friendship.
CBS News
Watch the excerpt in the video player above featuring Vedder talking about writing lyrics while surfing to an instrumental tape sent to him by a group of Seattle musicians, and bassist Jeff Ament’s reaction when he heard them:
EDDIE VEDDER: I was doing those midnight shifts security. So, when I went for a surf in the morning … I remember it being super foggy and one of those days where you think, ‘Maybe I won’t go out.’ … But I had the music in my head, the instrumental, and just kind of wrote it. And then, I was still wet when I hit ‘record.’
ANTHONY MASON: When you heard what he sent back, what did you think?
JEFF AMENT: I listened to it. And then I remember I left and went and got a coffee, and then I came back, and I listened to it again. … And then I remember calling Stone [Gossard] and I said, ‘You need to come over here right now.’
Ament, and guitarists Stone Gossard, and Mike McCready flew Vedder up to Seattle to audition.
VEDDER: It was just, I was like, you felt it. Like, you were like, ‘Oh, this is what it is. Like, this is heaven.'”
You can stream Pearl Jam’s latest album, “Dark Matter,” by clicking on the embed below (Free Spotify registration required to hear the tracks in full):
The Emmy Award-winning “Sunday Morning” is broadcast Sundays on CBS beginning at 9 a.m. ET. “Sunday Morning” also streams on the CBS News app [beginning at 11 a.m. ET] and on Paramount+, and is available on cbs.com and cbsnews.com.
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Stocks on Wall Street soared Thursday a day after the Federal Reserve slashed its benchmark interest rate by 0.50 percentage points, with investors cheering the central bank’s move to head off a slowdown in U.S. economic growth.
The Dow Jones Industrial Averages jumped 479 points, or 1.1%, as of 10:02 a.m. Eastern time to 41,982. The S&P 500 climbed 87 points, or 1.6%, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq jumped 2.3%.
“Stocks are exploding higher as markets absorb the Fed’s outsized rate cut,” Adam Crisafulli of Vital Knowledge said in a note to investors.
The half-point move signals that the Fed is acting aggressively to keep the U.S. economy from stalling, given that historically most rate cuts are 0.25 percentage points. The rate cut will provide some relief to U.S. consumers struggling with high borrowing rates impacting credit cards, mortgages and auto loans.
Stocks rose modestly immediately after the Fed’s announcement that it was lowering rates for the first time since March 2020. But with a day to digest the move, which included new data from the central bank forecasting solid economic growth in 2025, investors seemed buoyed in morning trade.
“I don’t see anything in the economy right now that suggests that the likelihood of a downturn is elevated — you see growth at a solid rate, you see inflation coming down and a labor market that is still at very solid levels,” Fed Chair Jerome Powell said in a press conference on Wednesday to discuss the rate cut.