Arlington Reads: David Brooks, Author of "The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life."

[Music] hello i'm sharon percy rockefeller president and ceo of weta proudly headquartered in arlington's shirlington neighborhood we are your local pbs station and the second largest producer of programming for pbs as an aside i wanted to tell you that i have a personal connection with arlington not only have i worked there every day for the last 30 years as ceo of weta but my mother and my father were married in the early 40s my father was in the navy and they lived at 402 george mason drive when they first got married so i've got an 80-year history with arlington although i've only been at wida for 30 years for nearly 60 years weta has served our community creating and presenting public media programming and content that educates inspires and engages our audiences since our founding by local leaders and visionaries including arlington's own elizabeth campbell we have pursued a mission of ardent public service promoting lifelong learning in our community that work continues in earnest today my distinguished friend and colleague university of chicago alum david brooks and yes i'm from chicago has offered illuminating insight and perspective on contemporary issues for decades as one of america's most prominent thought leaders david has been an op-ed columnist for the new york times since 2003 he has been a commentator for 20 years on our own weda's national pbs newshour produced here in arlington david's work with the weave project at the aspen institute promotes the power of relationships community and connection he reminds us to be inspired to find our multiple commonalities and be kind and to care for one another especially in these divisive times tonight we will learn about three arlington residents who exemplify the spirit behind david's weave project thank you for joining us for this arlington reads conversation well thank you to sharon rockefeller thank you to weta for supporting us today in this important conversation about how to build community you know this year it's i think clear to everybody even more how important community is but it's been so difficult with the pandemic and in fact we started out this year arlington we're big on community we've been doing it for a long time and trying to build community as things change but this year our theme for our book talks was we the people and of course the book talks like everything else changed quite a bit but i think we the people is a wonderful theme for um for our this year actually our attempt to um get through this year together build a sense of community and i'm really looking forward to the discussion with uh with mr david brooks today and our wonderful director of our libraries is going to head up diane crush and mark um why don't you talk a little tell us a little bit about diane and her um and her book talks that she gives thank you very much libby diane crash has been our director of libraries since 2006 and we're lucky to have her starting in 2009 she had the arlington read series we've had some exciting authors richard ford and patchett uh walter um wendell berry catherine boo uh zadie smith and patchett just a very long list and you can go on our website and see all the exciting authors that she has talked to diane's interviews are always provocative um and they raise a number of interesting questions and so i know that when she wraps up at the end it's going to be we're going to come back to a conversation among the three of us libby myself and diane so i'm very excited to introduce diane who will be interviewing david brooks so um see you all back here at the end of that interview thanks everybody thank you mark i'm diane crash director of arlington public library and it's my pleasure to be with you this evening the theme of arlington reads 2020 was we the people and we planned a series of conversations with five preeminent authors to discuss race identity and immigration to explore whether as americans we share a national story and to help us understand what our duties and responsibilities are or should be to one another then the pandemic happened and while some of these conversations have been postponed until 2021 the past seven months have given us the opportunity to think about just that what does community look like and how does it behave during a pandemic the pandemic has laid bare the inequities of our society from food and internet access to housing and health and it's made us reassess what essential work is as unheralded workers are putting their own health and safety on the line so we can find some semblance of normalcy think of your grocery cashiers your sanitation workers the delivery and bus drivers and of course our emts and the pandemic has raged against a backdrop of depolarization in our society pursuit of zero-sum games where we declare winners and losers widespread mistrust of our institutions and a prevalent feeling of life being lived in as psychoanalyst viktor frankl put it an existential vacuum the pandemic has also brought out some of the best of us in our community in our generosity our empathy our unceasing energy we've bagged and brought groceries to neighbors in need we've called seniors and isolated individuals to check on their well-being and we've donated our time and our resources so that we could get through this together and even though we don't know when the pandemic will end we do know it will the connections we've established the relationships that we've built the care that we've offered one another is important now more than ever and to show how we can harness this trust that we've built and how to build a more robust empathetic community is author david brooks welcome david it's great to be with you uh many of us know you from your new york times op-ed columns and then before that the wall street journal columns and i know you best for your appearances on the weekly news hour uh which for me is appointment television you're uh sparring with mark shields each week uh i have on my desk and i'm you know no point in reading it but it's an op ad that you wrote in may of 2015 and it's called what's your purpose and i was wondering if you could set the stage what were you thinking about at the time that made you go through a personal journey if you will a personal development process personal examination and led you to where you are today you published two books the road to character and the second mountain which we can refer to later and of course we have them in arlington library but please tell us where you were mentally and emotionally about six or seven years ago yeah i guess professionally i had achieved way more career success than i ever thought i would i got to work in the new york times in the newshour and various places and i learned that career success helps you avoid any anxiety you might feel if you felt yourself a failure but it doesn't give you that much positive happiness uh and along the way i had neglected my my relationships i had neglected um my friendships in particular and so at about that time my kids were leaving a home to go to college or about to or had my marriage had ended i was living alone in an apartment on wisconsin avenue and i realized that i had a lot of work friends people i could go to lunch with and talk politics i didn't know a lot of great weekend friendships the kind that are actually friendships who were the people you're actually intimate and close with and so the moment was symbolized for me in my apartment uh was i was working all the time i was like any idiot who tries to work their way through an emotional problem and a spiritual problem and uh if you went to my kitchen and pulled open the drawers where there should have been um forks and knives for guests i had post-it notes and where there should have been plates for guests i had envelopes and stuff like that stationary supplies and so that's a misled life and so i decided that i would you know try to change my life in a way that uh was deeper and more relational and more community oriented so i did i wrote two books one the road character which was about how do you lead a moral life and then the second mountain is really how do you lead a relational life and those books were not part of they were part of the solution they were not the whole solution actually leading a life uh dedicated to commitments was was part of the solution and i'm not perfect i still tend to uh shrink away sometimes from deep emotional bonds but i'm a lot better than i was and it's a it's a sign it was assigned to me that a life can change pretty dramatically at any stage in life if you choose to throw yourself into it now earlier this month you published a piece in the atlantic uh america and its moral convulsion and i also saw a tweet from you later that said it was the hardest thing you ever had to write and so tell us a little bit about what the moral convulsion is and do we find our way out of it yeah so it turns out i'm wasn't the only one going through a crisis of relationships uh our whole country is going through it and that's been evident for a few years with the you know the rising depression rates the rising suicide rates but it's been super uh present this year in 2020 and i i was helped uh learning about thinking about 2020 it was super confusing year to think about because so much was going on but uh samuel huntington uh harvard political scientist wrote a book in 1981 on the politics of disharmony and he said every 60 years america goes through a moral convulsion these are periods when people are indignant about how things are there have lost faith in systems they've lost faith in each other uh a new moral generation comes along the scene outside groups want to get inside and so he says we have these convulsions we had in the 1770s uh 1830s 1890s with a progressive error in the 1960s and all that and he predicted in 1981 that we'd probably have one around 2020 and lo and behold we had this convulsion we could have come together in covid and we did not and the crisis manifests itself as a crisis of trust that we don't trust each other we don't trust our institutions and so it's the same process that i was going through but on a national scale and it's how do you take isolation distrust and create some sense of trust and relationship and mutual commitment and community and that's really the challenge for all of us right so viktor frankl uh has a phrase for what i believe you're describing called an existential vacuum and i'm the mom of two millennial aged boys 28 and 32. mark schwartz has a couple of uh daughters in that age courthouse uh libby garvin garvey our county board chair has grandchildren so we're all boomers um and what what can we do to encourage this generation of um i'd say pretty activist i mean people who are looking for purpose and looking for something to uh identify with what what encouragement can we give them to help them either uh be more of who they are or in fact reach that second mountain that you talked about in your second book yeah i would say we one thing we can do let them learn from our successes and let them learn better i think over the course of the boomer generation we've made life fairer than it used to be fair for women fair for african americans fair for jews fairer for a lot of groups not all the way there but progress has been made our failures derive from maybe the flip side of our success which is we're a pretty individualistic generation starting in the 1960s the songs were about liberation people felt hemmed in they felt they were too conformist they felt too constrained and so the soldier free bird i'm a rambling man i'm born to run right and so if you look at the central boomer story it's the story of liberation and we've taken 60 years and we've had 60 years of individualism which has been great for the liberation of individuals it's not been great for the connections between people when i look at gen z and and millennials i look at a generation as you say super morally passionate super committed to community in a way um maybe people 20 years ago weren't but still distrustful still having grown up in an era that has let them down the financial crisis or donald trump and so helping cross generation all of us to find trusting organizations i think it's organizations and institutions are the key we learn to trust each other when we work together in community groups and we drive places together we do projects together we show up at meetings together it's by the daily acts of community life that trust gets rebuilt of course when we're living in a pandemic it makes the relationship building that much harder and of course i worry about the amount of time each of us spends on social media and tend to define ourselves by how many likes we have what our reach is how many thousands of people our tweets reach sadly my tweets reach nobody but but that's okay um but yeah there was another phrase that you used uh i heard in an interview ratchet hatchet pivot ratchet and is that a term that also applies to this era that we're in and if so where on the spectrum of of those four are we yeah this is not my term i forgot a political scientist at tufts i think and she argues that um history moves forward by what she calls ratchet hatchet pivot ratchet and basically what happens is a country confronts a problem in the 1960s there was civil rights it was feminism we had we had sexism we had these problems and we created a culture to solve it and we made some progress so we ratcheted it up but then the culture we created sort of stopped working too individualistic so we have to chop up the old culture and pivot over and create another new culture and then we'll ratchet up again right and she says those moments of hatcheting when we have to tear up what we built because we need something new those are bumpy and we're in the middle of a bumpy moment but the theory puts great faith in our ability to figure stuff out and i i guess i share that faith so let's talk a little bit about uh the weave program and where the weave concept how did you hit on that what was what was driving that um aha moment of creating that yeah well i was writing all these columns and they all came down to social isolation and disconnection which we've been talking about and i thought this is the core problem underlying a lot of our problems underlying polarization underlying a lot of economic problems and lack of social mobility and i realize it's being solved at the local level by people i call weavers who are really good at building relationship so we thought why don't we lift them up why don't we tell their stories why don't we illuminate them so the rest of the world can see oh that's a better way to live our theory is you got to change culture and to to change culture uh culture changes when a small group of people find a better way to live and the rest of us copy them and so we go around the country when we plot ourselves down whether it's in the englewood neighborhood in chicago or wilkes north carolina rural america and we say who's trusted here and we learn we run away we run across 75 people who are active in the community who are making that community work for example there's a guy named panchayat willis in houston he takes undocumented immigrants who have been paralyzed while working on construction sites and he gets them diapers and catheters and wheelchairs so they can lead dignified lives and he turns them into social workers so you'll be in your neighborhood in houston and 60 latino guys in wheelchairs will roll in your neighborhood to help your community and that's what they do they just rush to the hurricane they see a problem and they're just phenomenal at building relationships and somehow we we all should aspire to be a little more like that you don't have to be heroic like pancho but we can be a little more um a little more communal in just our daily lives well it seems that people too are are striving for that kind of community connection when i grew up in the 60s we knew everybody in the neighborhood we had parties and barbecues together if i went out to play i could be assured that all of the other mothers were looking out for each of us and we don't have that sense of connectedness now and so we want to take a couple of minutes to talk about the weavers that we've identified here in arlington so uh let's just take a quick look and then we'll talk for a minute afterwards arlington leaves is a place where people with disabilities can come and they can express themselves artistically and create this partnership with service source and arlington county really helps develop people individually and in the community they're referred here through dhs the department of human services they produce handcrafted items such as tote bags scarves small pouches lunch totes place mats tea towels small coin purses and when our items sell the participant that makes that particular item gets 100 percent of the proceeds today is special because we have a group from notre dame and they're here with a program that brings them into lars which is a group home that a couple of our participants are a part of and they're actually here to visit lori because uh it's lori's birthday soon and and they've all really become good friends with lori in the past few days they come here my favorite thing is placemats president um because the program at arlington weaves helps build confidence and self-esteem amongst the individuals because it not only gives them a sense of independence when they can choose the colors and the types of patterns that they want to build but then it also helps them to want to turn the paycheck into um and to receive some sort of payback for their artistry it's a very rewarding feeling to know that our artists are recognized as artists out throughout the local community here and just seeing them transition from learning how to initially warp a loom into actually creating a piece of product that sells is just the best feeling ever and for them to come in and say sharon i gotta check in the mail and they're so excited really makes me excited that i took them through that journey i feel so wonderful to be here so i can make my greatest style [Music] i'm a recovering serious aholic and perfectionist so when i can laugh at myself i am good to go i'm diane lynn cohen i'm an executive and career coach with coaching to connect and what brings me here today which i'm very grateful and appreciative for is that i'm a certified laughter yoga leader and a laughter ambassador there's four elements there's clapping there's childlike playfulness and there's the pranayama breathing which is the yoga piece we don't do poses we laugh and we breathe a lot laughter yoga is laughing for no reason it's a unique concept there are no jokes we laugh at ourselves its mission is world peace so many people are mocked or laughed at or put down or treated cruelly and so when we laugh at ourselves and nodded other people it's a wonderful tool i've learned so many lessons i think one of the greatest is resilience and how laughter contributes to that because when you start to laugh at yourself or at the problem you can bounce back and gain your power it boosts our immunity it's non-political non-competitive non-judgmental and it helps with stress throw our stress into the middle of the room and we run to the middle of the room and we stomp on them i realized that community was happening the first night 30 people showed up and then i did it at the washington national cathedral and 60 people showed up when we could laugh together it was just a wonderful sense of community a strong community is built of like-minded people they're people who enjoy the common interest and they show up they contribute and they're willing to be kind and keep laughing [Music] part of my mental health insanity was really driven by me locking in to the initiative from day one [Music] my name is david gloss and i'm the chef and owner of bayou bakery coffee bar and eatery in arlington virginia chefs feeding families essentially is an initiative that we launched just three days after learning that all the schools were going to be closed and it's in partnership with real food for kids which is a non-profit here in northern virginia the women that i employ were directly affected their families and their children by this shutdown and it was really my wife saying you know you know you got to do something because i came home that day telling her about you know my team and their kids and oh my god how are they going to get meals the fact that i was able to lock into something early on even not even knowing what was happening with my own business gave me a sense of purpose and direction and really kind of helped me stay grounded so for me it was about how do i navigate again well i put a wooden spoon in my hand i started stirring beans beans and rice a staple for so many different cultures and you know a also an inexpensive food source with actually a lot of nutrients so it was kind of like we checked all the boxes and just went for it we've been in business now for 10 years and it really wasn't until the pandemic and the beginning of it that i i truly started to feel connected bye i often always refer to that i'm in arlington county and now i kind of talk about that i'm in the arlington community you know i think that learning lessons i think just being kinder to people you know not being so busy if it feels like it put certain things in perspective for me for the most part they're all good though good good lessons and and ones that i will keep with me for the rest of my life [Music] there are children here in arlington county who are not getting the full benefit of the quality of education that's available [Music] my name is cherise kearns i am co-chair of the naacp education committee and a founding member of black parents of arlington i am an advocate for educational equity here in arlington county what we'd like is to eventually have a school system where race ethnic background income level or disability status isn't a predictor of your level of success or your potential an important part of equity is understanding who's missing whose voices are missing and trying to get those voices to the table if i'm constantly bumping into walls and why should i continue every time i get to that point i get some sort of bubble that tells me about the why so you know someone will come up to me and say charisse i really appreciate the work you're doing or you know we'll get news out of aps of some innovation that they've done where you can look at it and you can say this is what we've been pushing for so you know there'll be a little piece of progress that that inspires me to continue with this work a strong community is built from trust i think it comes from great communication and i think transparency and we need to be able to love one another i mean the kind of love where it drives you to action i feel optimistic i think that there are some changes happening in aps that are very intentional and i think that they're going to ultimately be beneficial to minority communities and i'm excited about that [Music] in in in viewing them what what stood out to you as characteristics of of a weaver well i mean they're all weber because they're all uh joining people for common cause but i guess you know for um david saw a problem uh and it hit him in the face he didn't actually go out looking for it it's just how's my team doing uh how do i feed the kids how other people feeding their kids and uh so he just responded to the problem i find weavers do that it's not like they say well i'm going to sit down and be a weaver there's a problem and they need to respond or in some cases something bad happens to them they lose a child and they don't want to happen other people and so they form an organization that'll maybe help prevent teenage depression and and kids taking their own lives and so what david is there was a felt need and he just responded and what's beautiful about that story is that he feels he's deeper into the neighborhood than he ever was he was on the block but he's not in the block and and so he's had his life transformed by this and and that's what so happens often is that you're leading a different kind of life suddenly you take on these burdens and by taking on burdens you lighten your life [Music] right and what what strikes me too is that it's it's simple kind of basic step when you step back one person one neighborhood one initiative at a time but the cumulative effect can bring about real transformation my my favorite moment in david's uh video was when he said you know i i saw there was a problem before us and i grabbed a big spoon and he started uh making the beans and rice and i thought i thought that was just um just perfect uh we also had the uh the laughing yoga thoughts thoughts about that yeah i forgot her phrase diane's um phrase she used to be a perfectionist and then a serious alcoholic or something like that uh and so what's beautiful about that is it's she's emerging from her own reality that she had this problem she was perfectionist she probably didn't laugh enough uh and so she figures out a solution and she shares it and there's this interest for it the number of people who showed up the meeting the number of people who showed up at the national cathedral um there is a hunger in this country for forms of community for forms of intimacy for forms of emotional sharing that is often unmet in everyday life and so somebody like her who just um radiates transparency uh there's a hunger for that and i find as i go around the country when you really think about what weavers are doing they're making people feel felt they're they're making people feel seen and at the core of every successful community or organization or family is the ability to know other people and be deeply known yourself and we don't teach that in schools but she she has it in abundance what i also liked about her she she sort of surrendered the ego she and even sort of at one point it was less about me and and being kind to others and seeing others and and making that possible and just the way she ended it you know be kind and laugh i mean how many times do we think about laughing at ourselves no we don't like to do that and uh that that sense of ego less is that also true uh a characteristic of the weaver for sure they live lives for for their lives are not about self um their runs really are about surface and they take on a lot of burdens and sometimes there's risk of burnout but the thing that they also share often is what what she has is the ability to be vulnerable and childlike right and i hope if i were around her i'd be uninhibited enough to actually do the silly stuff but um but to lead people in that way is is a way of just breaking down the adult encrustations that built up around our personalities absolutely right we've all got these protective shells which are in many cases decades old and hardened over i've i'm she does classes for the library actually and i'm told that it's really it's fun and infectious i don't even like yoga so i'm not sure i'm going to join in but it looked like an incredible release and then the third person is cherise kearns and she is active in education and advocating for black students in particular um thoughts about uh about her piece and her work yeah i mean what brings communities together it's it's common loves and one of the things that community loves in common is their kids and so working through the school system and this is something i want to celebrate about her it's easy to have like at this informal gathering but the health of our society is based on our institutions based on the structures whether it's governmental or county government or the school system and so continually improving the school systems and reforming them is the work and i think a lot of people have lost faith in institutions they say oh they don't work institutions don't work i'm anti-institutional but we have to make it work because that's you know what we live and that's what we get educated within so her going to meetings advocating for african-american kids is a way a to make the school system better and b to restore the you know the core problem that our nation has been wrestling with for centuries right she also talks a lot about people asking her you know do you ever get tired of advocating for this issue and she and you know do you ever feel like hitting the wall and she says when i do i think about the why and the why as opposed to the how can you talk a little bit about the importance of the y and the grounding of the y yeah one of the things i find about weavers is that they um they do get tired because the work is sometimes very hard but they tend not to give up but i've never met one who said you know i'm gonna do this for a couple of years and then i'll go off and do something else they know why they were placed on this earth and they are driven by that sense of not by money and status i need to feel uh right with the world that they are serving a moral purpose their motivations tend to be moral motivations rather than material motivations and she seems like and and she also talks about again the importance of love i mean just just loving each other and again um some of us feel i mean i'm somebody for whom uh if somebody were to call me a lover i'd be horrified um a strong leader etc but uh we tend to shy away from those rooms and i think that's another example of shying away from our intimacy and our willingness to be vulnerable and to get too close to other people and these folks don't seem to have that problem yeah i would say it's a problem unique or not unique but especially in the washington dc metro area that somehow we draw the most including myself the most emotionally avoidant people on the face of the earth and we talk about systems and we want to talk about public life and politics and the law and other things uh but uh we're not as good sometimes at talking about the intimacies and and this is a problem with our school system is that it for decades and in many places not at all they've treated kids as brains on a stick right and they treated the whole emotional social the whole child and so but education is fundamentally about the love between a teacher and a student that you you don't learn from people you don't have some affection for and don't want to please and no one to earn their respect and so reintroducing that into schools is super important work i remember some of the teachers that i had over the decades and how uh in many cases they really saved me from myself when i didn't even know i needed saving so it's an important relationship and again one i worry about as we are doing more social distancing and not as available in the classroom as as we might be it challenges us to think of more uh ingenious ways of connecting i want to talk to i believe sharif also mentioned the con concept of trust and we've talked about uh a diminishing of trust in our institutions in our family you know in our in our communities and again the role of trust uh when it's absent uh how do we rebuild it yeah that's a you know i did this big long piece about trust for the atlantic and i talked to all these social scientists they all said we know a lot about how trust is destroyed we don't know how it's built because it hasn't been built in a long time and you know we have lost faith our institutions and in each other if you talk to young adults and you ask them can most people be trusted they'll like 20 say yeah most people can be trusted most do not believe people can be trusted and it's super hard to do business deal if you don't trust the other person it's super hard to build an organization it's super hard to spontaneously build a culture but i do think trust when it has been rebuilt and that the best historical example is in the 1890s when people built um first they had a shift in culture from a very individualistic culture to a more communal one then they had a civic renaissance they created all these organizations in the 1890s the boys and girl scouts the boys and girls clubs the temperance movement the settlement house movement the naacp the union so just one organization after another just got built um suffragettes and all at once uh and so it was within those organizations that trust was built up and community was reestablished and then later they had the progressive movement which cleaned up government and so it you can do it but i do think you have to work on common projects together and see each other but you know trust is the ratio between the number of times you've been betrayed and the number of times you haven't been betrayed when people have actually kept their promises sure and but you you've got to put yourself in situations where people are making and keeping their promises to one another and then people then say oh yeah the world is a trustworthy place right the the line between advocacy maybe um assertive advocacy and tribalism which you've described in a couple of your of your writings and uh and weaving uh is that is that a difficult line to keep separate i mean when does tribalism um become the thing as opposed to i'm working on behalf of a group i'm a part of uh and i'm working for a greater good is there tension between those two yeah they can blend into each other when threat arises but to me community is love of a common thing like love of arlington county we just love our place and we want to serve it tribalism is hatred of another and so if you were joining because you love arlington county that's community if you're joining because you hate montgomery county that's tribalism and so often a lot of our groupings are not based on mutual love but on a shared hatred of something else and one grows out of abundance mentality community does that there's enough for all if we can all thrive of my community you have yours there's enough for all the other grows out of a scarcity mentality which is not enough for all and if i've got to grab mine because they're going to grab it first yeah and it's really that basic mindset shift yeah sort of the zeros um the tragedy of the commons you know i'm looking out for me first in my interest and i need to get there first or there won't be any for me uh we are arlington county we are a government and we are interested in growing more weavers we identified a handful in the community i also forgot to mention the the non-profit that we also uh featured and that's a non-profit that gives basically work for uh developmentally and intellectually develop underdeveloped uh adults and give them a sense of purpose and dignity a way to give back to the community through weaving and they create woven products and when it's not covered we we actually have a store and we sell them and so now we're trying to do is is have uh each of them uh have a loom in their home so that they continue to have that sense of purpose and connectedness but getting back to the government uh we're a government and we're interested in in improving the social fabric and what what role if any you talked about institutions earlier uh local governments or institutions how can they catalyze weaving so that we can be better together well first in my travels you know i live in dc and when i travel to any county even a neighboring area let alone across nebraska or louisiana the local governments are always so much healthier and the relationships between the people within working in the governments and serving the governments is just a lot healthier than say in the united states congress so that's already a step up i do think government can do things if government can't build a lot of the relationships that are trusting relationships those are built between people but government can set the table government can use the schools first as a place to emphasize that a school is a community not just a factory for knowledge but also using the schools as hubs for the surrounding communities with wraparound services and things like that right and then government can set a place of even physical places apart and something like that can clean up a place can create a meeting ground government can also uh reward service um and and either subsidize or somehow provide hosts for people who do want to start um communities they know i was at a place in detroit where they've taken an old abandoned school which they've got a lot of in detroit and they've just made it sort of a it would be a tech hub but it's for non-profits and they all are in this big school and they all are interacting and and the people in the neighborhood were suspicious at first because they didn't know what's happening and now they're um enthusiastic because they've got a community center right and so there are a lot of government can set the table for these kinds of relationships i'm thinking too with schools uh there's been a lot of talk about bringing back um classes in civics i mean just basic how do we live and and work together in community and how do we bring about change and not leave everything to the highest levels of legislatures or state governments in the atlantic article again you called out houston texas so i'm curious what what stands out with houston or what do they have that we don't yeah well arlington may have it it's they're not dissimilar i mean if you go to i'm from new york city i grew up there and if you go to new york you know where the midtown is you know where the center of the thing is if you go to houston you don't know where the center there's no center they've got a lot of different centers and houston is the most diverse uh city in america it's got 120 languages i think spoken in the school system uh and and what they've got is they've got i just don't think we're going to be centralized the way we were when we were like basically a white protestant country we're going to be a more diverse pluralistic country we're not going to quite have a center but in houston they have a lot of different centers and you drive through houston and sometimes you feel like you're in lagos nigeria sometimes you feel like you're in vietnam sometimes you feel like you're in china there's just all these little ethnic enclaves and the thing they have is they welcome you in and so if you move there and believe me i'm not a huge fan of the city because it's kind of ugly but um but if you move there they welcome you and they don't ask you about your past they ask you about your future and there's a reigning atmosphere of goodwill and so even with all the diversity there's good will i would say toward each other in arlington counties like this it's obviously got tremendous diversity it's got tremendous income diversity and it's got different centers and but what but you what houston proves and maybe arlington too that you can be really diverse and decentralized and still have sort of a coherent culture to it a coherent identity that you know this is who we are here i think that's one of the things that we want to be pursuing uh you talk a lot about what is the national story uh i'd like us to think about what is our community story does everybody see themselves in that community story and if not why not we are going to be launching a series of race and equity dialogue uh across the community uh some of it borne out of recent events with black lives matter and some of the police shootings uh but also just to get more in touch with our community and and you know who's benefiting who isn't and how do we know and i think uh again celebrating stories like the weavers like we did today is a good step along with some of these other steps that we're taking uh again i've heard you interviewed a number of times and you've talked about being a bookish sort uh i'm also a bookish sort being a librarian so curious uh not necessarily on this topic but what's on your nightstand what are you most excited about reading currently well i'm trying to understand this skill of of knowing others and being known like how do you do that and so i've been reading a lot of uh psychology and so i just finished a book named mind by how a child develops intellectually uh and uh so that's on my nightstand i've just finished a book uh some books are really rereading of by a neuroscientist out at usc who studies people who've suffered lesions in their brain and they they're they have they can't process emotion you show them a horrible picture they know they should feel shocked by it but they just can't process emotion and you would think that those people are super smart mr spock's because they're so rational and logical but they're incomparable they can't do life because what our emotions do they don't distract from reason they assign value to things and if you don't know what the value of something is then uh you can't you can't uh make a decision about it and so he shows that emotions are really the undergirding of reason not the opposite of reason and you've also spoken of the role of the soul you know the heart uh the mind the soul what what do you mean when you when you talk about the soul you're not necessarily talking in a religious or formal religious sense yeah i just observe the fact that i've never met a human being who didn't want to do good uh and even people who do really bad things and i've interviewed people of criminals and war criminals and dictators they want to tell you a story about how they're a good person and so i the lesson i draw from that is that there's some piece of you that has no weight or size or color but it it gives you infinite value and dignity because they have that piece of them in them and it doesn't require you to believe in god we all know that we have this peace and it we're not equal in our brain power we're not equal in our muscle power but we're equal at the level of soul we're all equal right and what the soul does in my view is um it it yearns for goodness it we want to do something that serves something some ideal and so i just observe people on it you can be a person of faith or not but i would ask you to believe that you have a soul and everybody else around you has a soul and if you treat them as if they have souls you'll probably end up treating them reasonably well yeah better certainly uh and what about the role of of libraries in uh sustaining community telling the community's story supporting weavers yeah well libraries i've never seen an institution that has so successfully transformed itself in the face of new conditions it's not only about books anymore libraries all around the country are the absolute sources of community uh and i have a friend eric kleinenberg who calls them cathedrals for the people right and uh and i was talking to him as a sociologist and he says if we didn't have libraries would we have the courage to build them are we the kind of society who built library would build libraries would build these fabulous community centers that are now doing a million different things and he said i'm not sure we would we somehow we don't seem to be good at building things anymore right and thank god we have them but it should inspire us the creation libraries and people think of andrew carnegie but mostly it was county line was government libraries right um and uh we should it should inspire us to think about well what can we build now or how can we take libraries a step further uh because it shows that we don't be hopeless the solutions are are potentially around us well certainly arlington library system began just as you described it was a bunch of individuals it was women in garden clubs and and book clubs and cooking clubs who felt that children needed some activity after school to keep from being in trouble so they they very deliberately set about to create the neighborhood system that we still have today uh i also uh wanted to ask you about paddington bear who apparently had a very uh significant impact on your life you read paddington bear when you were seven and decided to be a writer so what was it about the bear uh well i it's funny i went back and reread that book about two years ago and i was a little shocked by it because it's a sad book it's about this bear who comes from peru and doesn't have a family stuck at a train station in england and suddenly a family sweeps them up and takes them in and i thought wow what kind of kid was i that this really struck me but mostly was the act of really enjoying a book and uh and i thought well i would love to write that i'd like to create that and so i started writing and it's been 50 years and probably um 200 days have not gone by where i haven't written or prepared to write so that's been my life that's what i do and i shouldn't tell you this story but when i was in high school my friends and i were out at 2 a.m and we were thought we'd do some something daring that's teen daring um so we broke into our local library and once we got in once we got inside we just ran around and then we left but uh you know you're a book person when you're you're active high school daring do is to break into a library we didn't see any books we were fine i love that story and it might appear in our end of the year report turning back one final time to the atlantic uh article you talk about um let's see the uh beauty i'm gonna find the quote here the beauty in the storm the beauty in the storm uh in the midst of moral convulsion and what hope do you have that we're going to find those spots of beauty in the storm yeah well i think it is the weavers i i've i've spent you know the last three years with them and it's been a tough political season but they have lifted me up every time just amazing people some who've been through the worst things you can imagine there's a woman named sarah atkins i met outside of columbus ohio who uh her husband killed their kids and himself and she's been through the worst you can imagine but she now um is a teacher she now has a free pharmacy because she's a pharmacist she now has helps women who suffered from violence and so you around her and she says i'm not fully stable and you know it's this has been three or four years and but it's horrible um and yet it's a life of service and so you are around these people and you see richard rohr who's a franciscan monk says they have a he has a phrase upright sadness and they're not blind to the problems of society but there's a brightness about them and so those people lift them up and we've just seen some videos of people like that and um and so you you have some basic faith and i and i found they're everywhere it's not like they're rare they're they're everywhere and so that that's what gives me hope so we will leave it there uh it's been a delightful conversation with you david brooks and we will let our readers know that uh let's see it's we are weavers.org is your foundation and we appreciate again the work that you're doing the work that you have been doing uh opening our minds to the importance of love and friendship and relationships and most of all having a bias toward action even if it's a small step one person one neighborhood at a time so as i as i thank you again on behalf of all of arlington stay well stay safe and stay hopeful thank you david thank you and i can't wait till i can get back to shirlington where we do the newshour and um just enjoy northern virginia again yes indeed thank you thanks well that was terrific and i'm here now again with libby and mark libby garvey and mark schwartz and david certainly gave us a lot to think about so before we start about next steps and where we go from here can you tell me please what a couple of the key takeaways were libby let's start with you ah sure i think i loved it in so much this in a way it was complex but it was simple my big takeaway was kindness how important kindness is um and i think we're seeing that more and more um so that that was a great kind takeaway simple acts of kindness and how about you mark yeah so listening to it one thing that struck me personally was though i don't think my life is quite like this but it echoed this concept of opening up the drawer where your cutlery is and seeing all these post-it notes to me that speaks to making sure you have balance and i think that that's something that i need to work on and i think later on uh or at one point he commented about how people in washington dc sort of are always focused on those kinds of things um the work and so bringing that balance and is what really really struck stuck with me right well that kind of launched him on the journey he was stuck on the first mountain of success and then realized how empty he felt so uh libby he also talked about the value of institutions where local government we are an institution we are a player in in transformation so what do you think what do you think of the idea of institutions in the role they play i love what he talked about government setting the table right um because i mean and let's face it government is how people organize themselves in societies if we're talking about community you've got to have a government of some sort and i think his point about setting the table we're supposed to set the circumstances for people to thrive and to make sure that we make sure everyone thrives which and i know we'll get into it later that's part of the whole deal with systemic racism because sometimes government sets the table and some people get to the table some people don't um but i really love that kind of analogy right and of course i've got to throw a plug in for libraries he called us what civic cathedrals yes that's now going to go on our website uh our new tagline uh the other the other part of it that really struck me was of course the features on our own weavers we have the dhs arlington weavers uh and then we had the three who were featured yesterday uh in the uh in the conversation between the two of us we have diane cohen the laughing yoga david gloss who is the chef and owner of bayou bakery and then finally cherise kearns and the work she does on behalf of black parents of arlington so what struck you about their stories well let let me start on that and i think that i'm simply going to be repeating what what david brooks said which is the the willingness of of individuals to step up and try to make a difference and the uh effort that it required and and i think that the fact that people just have to keep going at it and they and he said i think about weavers generally once they start they never stop and i think of each of those individuals and another a whole host of other members of our community that literally when you start it doesn't take energy away from you it gives you energy at the same time you're you're helping the community that's absolutely true how about you libby yeah no i i really loved the the fact that they were sort of ordinary people extraordinary ordinary people um and i think that's part of the theme it's just it's really wonderful um and i think it keeps us all going i think particularly by the time you get to a certain age many of us have when you go through a hard time i i think everybody finds if you can not focus on yourself and the difficulties you're having focus on helping others you feel so much better you feel so much better well and brooke's talked a lot about that you're surrendering the ego in service to other people and all of those uh folks hit those notes of love and kindness and reaching out and it's not about me and uh i i thought each of those stories was incredibly powerful so let's talk about how we can grow more weavers because they have demonstrated that really everybody anyone can be a weaver and we have a series of race and equity conversations that we're launching in the community and we're expecting those to be both challenging but ultimately uh transforming conversations so how can we link these concepts of growing weavers and challenging racism in our community mark do you want to start yeah this this is something i've been thinking about especially since i got to you know listen to the interview you had with david brooks having the conversations about uh diversity and race and equity they are not easy things to do um we're asking people to literally open themselves up and say here are some problems i have and concerns and um it's very taxing and will be very emotional for a lot of people and i'm not going to pretend to speak for all the people who participate in it but i will tell you that i think at the end of the day reaching an understanding on an intellectual level i think is important but unless you tie it with actual acts of kindness right acts of giving to the community at the end of the day unless we do that we will really thought through the problem really well but we will not have really changed the community so i think marrying up the tough conversations with actual actions on the part of every individual i think is going to be a real challenge for us and i think it's something that we'll need to figure out how to incorporate better uh into the dre dialogues right how about you libby yeah you know i'm thinking about how our colleague christian dorsey when he talks about these conversations says that you know these are difficult conversations and because they are that you tend to only have them with people who are kind of in your own bubble if you will um people that you are comfortable with that you have similar views with you don't sit down and talk about racism with somebody that you don't know and don't really know where they're coming from or they come from a different place um and that's the table we're trying to set here is to bring people together um and part of the reason you know i think sometimes people might say well people just need to talk give us some questions and we'll just talk well the fact is i think as mark talked about that this is difficult um and i think it's going to be a little painful um and so the point is not which is kind of typically arlington about all those those things in the drawers people are just policy wonks right people can intellectualize this as much as they want but when you really talk about the issue right it's it's issues of the heart it's issues of the soul and it's very very personal so the only way to have a really good conversation is to kind of know each other and build up a sense of trust to have those conversations it doesn't happen immediately i also want to remind the community that we have a questionnaire that we distributed and that we have available through the end of the calendar year so that people can do a self reflection on where they are on the race and equity continuum and i think we'll use that as one of the tools to open up conversations among ourselves so if you don't know about the questionnaire if you haven't looked at it yet uh it will be available on the county website so in in wrapping up this conversation he has this beautiful phrase uh for these times of tumult which is looking for the uh spots of beauty uh in a storm and that that more than anything i think has stuck with me and resonated with me uh as we close out what are examples of the spots of beauty in the storm that each of you think about what gets you through so um i'm going to pick two one which is just an example of an organization that started up about five or six years ago arlington neighborhood villages were where people literally on their own spontaneously decided that they were going to reach out and help other people who might not be able to drive places or assist with tasks and here this is this is going to sound a little shameless but it's really struck me i was thinking about this last night beauty in the storm i'm going to say weta and i know we started off with sharon rockefeller's comments but if you think about it and listen to what she said her mom and dad were in the community 80 years ago she came here and she's for 30 years weta and all the work they do and the pbs family is a constant source for me of beauty in the middle of the storm and i think that we don't want to lose that especially in the kind of media environment we're in right now so um i think that i'm so happy that they're going to be staying in arlington and we worked really hard on that over the last four or five years and a lot of thanks obviously to to libby and the board on on that process but i i think that's worth mentioning that's terrific mark libby yeah you know and i i loved it the way sharon talked to i didn't know she had all those roots in arlington of course they're staying here they're part of our family in our community which is really really special very arlington um you know for me i keep coming back to i think it's the randolph pta um you know we get so many examples and i will tell you i get you know emails and seeing things in a you know we get a lot of criticism from people they're people that are upset understandably so but we also keep hearing about good things that are happening they're like little sparks of light you know that kind of keeps you going and the randolph pta they just keep going every week they pull together bags of groceries and feed about 150 250 families a week and they just kept going and at one point um so randolph is you know of course in a part of arlington where they have a lot of families in their school community that need that needs support but um and also jamestown pta which they don't have many people with need they they started putting together bags of groceries and bringing them to randolph to distribute right and it's just growing it's just beautiful it really is wonderful and i am i think that's how i survived as a as an optimist at my age i really focus on all of those positive positive things that's that's my focus and really that beauty in in the eye of the storm helps us get through yeah i mean it was just a beautiful phrase and just back to the weta influence uh i grew up in arlington as as both of you know and i was an early viewer of weta in at tuckahoe elementary the big tv would be rolled into the classroom one day a week for a french lesson i didn't retain much uh but it just speaks to its long-standing uh adherence and advocacy for education and and culture and really celebrating the community so kudos to weta for their work and for their continued relationship with us so as we wrap uh i'd like to give each of you a chance for a final word as we launch into the next several months of uh building a community and looking for weavers well my final word would be that sometimes people underestimate their own power and their own ability to make change and uh don't i mean if you have that spark which both of you have mentioned um try to capture it and move ahead with it and i'm an optimist i think that there's an enormous amount of power in uh the individual uh working and working collectively in the community so i'll just leave it at that sounds great mark libby yeah i love that point mark and you know david brooks talked about soul we all have a soul and and everybody's got that spark in them everybody does um and we all just need to help we we in government need to help set the table um and just as individuals do whatever we can to pull out and and and bring out that spark um you know i i was i keep thinking back to um this children's movie although it was for adults too cinderella that came out about five or six years ago took my granddaughter to it and it was a great kind of modern remake with a powerful cinderella but her theme was have courage and be kind have courage and be kind and i think as we go into these courageous conversations and continue to get through this storm that is the pandemic if we all have courage and are kind we're going to be just fine and if we can be humble and and gracious and you know frankly just cut one another a little bit of slack i think that goes a long way uh i'm i'm also on team optimism and uh i look forward to the next several months thank you both for your conversation and thoughts this afternoon and uh looking forward to the next chapter thank you diane thanks a lot [Music] you

Channel: Arlington VA Public Library

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Keywords: Arlington Public Library, Virginia

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Length: 67min 42sec (4062 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 29 2020