Gracious reader,
Good morning! I am up early, about to catch a flight to Colorado Springs, and I’m going to tell you a story today about the time I got hate mail accusing me of being in the pocket of Big Buc-ee’s.
What is Buc-ee’s, you ask? It is a massive gas station, a Texas export, beloved in Texas, and I would go so far as to say it has something of a cult following. This is what I’ve heard from ardent supporters, not just in Texas but around the country. People are really passionate about this gas station, which has its own merch line, its own lore, its own mascot.
I’ll tell you that story in just a minute, because that is where I’m going today, to Palmer Lake, Colorado, a small, beautiful mountainside town just outside Colorado Springs in the Pikes Peak region. But first, I want to tell you what happened last week in Iowa, because both of those engagements were the product of countless conversations, more than a year of work and partnership with these communities and institutions, and it was beautiful to finally see what all of that had become.
A wonderful problem in Urbandale, Iowa
I shared some of this story last week, including the wonderful problem we had: too many people wanted to come and talk about civilty, so we had to move to a venue that seated over 1000 people. Here is the background: The mayor of Urbandale, Bob Andeweg, showed up in Carmel, Indiana, last year when Carmel hosted a civility summit inspired by my work.
In Carmel, more than 100 leaders from across politics, geography and vocation gathered around themes from my book: that civility is not politeness, that agreement is not the goal, but that recognizing the dignity and humanity of the other, and learning to flourish across difference, is.
Bob came up to me afterward and essentially said, I love this. I love what you built in Carmel. I want this in Urbandale.
And I loved hearing that, especially because Bob has been mayor for more than two decades, Urbandale is a beautiful community, and there was nothing in the way of some enormous civic catastrophe that forced him into this. He didn’t discover civility because his community was in crisis. He could probably have done nothing, sat on his hands and said, We’re doing fine, but that’s not who he is. He wanted Urbandale to be better, to be excellent.
So he started by giving my book to his City Council, and Urbandale chose The Soul of Civility as its community read. Last week, after a year of conversations and reading and planning, nearly 400 people came together for the Civility Dialogues, with so much interest that the event had to be moved to a larger venue, something Axios actually reported on before I arrived.
I joined Bob, members of the City Council, former superintendent Greg Robinson and former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack, who also served as U.S. Secretary of Agriculture under Presidents Obama and Biden, and we talked about the challenges to civility, but also about the opportunity for Urbandale to become a hub of renewal in Iowa.
Governor Vilsack has a striking history with political violence himself. His entrance into public life came after the mayor of his town was shot and killed during a city council meeting, leaving a vacancy that Vilsack was encouraged to fill, and he has been mindful of the threat of political violence ever since.
I loved what he said toward the end of our conversation. He didn’t really know anything about me or what we had been building over the past year, although of course he knew Bob and knew Urbandale, but after listening to the conversation he said that he loved what Urbandale was building and wanted to see it become a model for the rest of Iowa.
As Business Record Reported:
Vilsack urged Urbandale to make civility something Iowa is known for.
“I love this. It’s a great forum,” Vilsack said. “But what if Urbandale becomes the center of [civility] and Urbandale is so successful at it that communities around the state begin to adopt it. Instead of us trying to lure people to our state or keep people in our state by talking about tax breaks or all the things that we talk about, what if Iowa was the place that was known as the center of civility?”
I love that vision because it is exactly what Bob and other leaders in Urbandale and I have been talking about for the past year. The goal was never to get nearly 400 people into an auditorium, and it wasn’t even to have *The Soul of Civility* as a community read. The goal was to widen the circle, to bring more and more voices into the conversation across Urbandale, and to have leaders throughout the community embody flourishing across difference as a way of life.
I told everyone that evening that this is their project now. It isn’t my project, and it isn’t even Bob’s project. It is part of their duty of citizenship to show up, to recognize the dignity and humanity of the other, day in and day out.
The next day, St. Ambrose
The next morning, I went to Davenport, Iowa, to St. Ambrose University, where a professor named Joseph Hebert had reached out to me last year and invited me to speak. I said, How about this? How about we build an era of multidimensional human flourishing on your campus?
And he said yes.
Joseph recruited a Civic Renaissance Ambassador cohort of about 30 people from the campus and surrounding community. He taught *The Soul of Civility* last semester, and now he has built an entire course on civil discourse, with my book as a central text, that is part of the core curriculum at St. Ambrose. If anyone is interested in that syllabus, write to me and I’ll be happy to share it with you, because I just love that. And now they are developing a certification program in civility for students and people across the university.
One story from my time there I will never forget. A philosophy professor told us that she teaches a course on human conflict, and she couldn’t get her students to talk, couldn’t get them to share what they actually thought, until finally one brave student explained why. She didn’t want to know what her fellow students believed, because once she knew, she couldn’t unknow it, and if they held certain views she found contemptible, she worried she wouldn’t be able to remain friends with them.
I thought that was such a powerful reflection of this chilling effect happening in workplaces and universities across the country, where people are afraid to voice their opinions, afraid to share deeply held ideas about who they are and what they believe, because they fear reprisal or social repercussions.
We talk a great deal about free speech in terms of laws and policies, and rightly so, but there is also a culture that has to exist underneath free speech. You can formally possess the right to speak and still live in a community where no one is willing to exercise it, which is something I’ll be thinking about later this week when I head to Nashville for the Global Free Speech Summit.
But first, Buc-ee’s.
“Are you in the pocket of Big Buc-ee’s?”
Palmer Lake is this beautiful mountainside town of about 2,500 people, 15 or so minutes outside Colorado Springs, and for the past few years it has been in national headlines over a proposed Buc-ee’s.
I first learned about what was happening there through Lori Jarvis and Lisa Brandt, two wonderful women in Colorado Springs who reached out to me a few months after *The Soul of Civility* came out and eventually founded Reclaiming Civility. They brought me to Colorado Springs this spring, and while I was there I met the mayor of Palmer Lake, who told me that Lori and Lisa had given him my book, he had read it and loved it, and then he asked me: Can you help us?
I laughed and told him that I didn’t think I could solve his Buc-ee’s problem, but I would love to partner with him and other people in the community to think about what kind of future could transcend this particular division, because the thing that struck me immediately was that whether people were against Buc-ee’s being developed or for it, they were arguing from what they understood to be love of their community.
The people who didn’t want Buc-ee’s worried about the environment, traffic, development, and what an enormous fluorescent gas station would do to the character of this tiny mountainside town. The people who wanted it worried about the tax base, roads, schools, public services and the long-term financial health of a community that has struggled to pay its bills.
They disagreed, in other words, about what love of Palmer Lake required.
And the disagreement got vicious, with slashed tires, recalls, resignations, lawsuits, restraining orders, public firings and scandals, just thing after thing that this poor town has endured over the past few years. Eventually *The Washington Post* and *The Wall Street Journal* and others arrived and reported on how this tiny town was tearing itself apart, making Palmer Lake something of a national case study in the decline of civility in America, which of course only added insult to injury because no community wants to become a poster child for division and instability.
So when the mayor asked me if I could help, I said: Let’s keep talking.
I happened to be going to Aspen in June, and a few weeks beforehand I reached out and said, I know this is last minute, but I’m going to be in Colorado, so what if we put together a leadership retreat, invite people from Palmer Lake and across the Pikes Peak region, and start thinking together about what comes next?
Within a few weeks, about 25 leaders from across the region gathered in Palmer Lake, with neighboring communities and local foundations helping support the gathering. We talked and ate and rested and asked people what they loved about their communities, what had been lost, and what they wanted to build.
And somewhere in the process, I started getting hate mail.
I’m not someone who gets a ton of hate mail, but people were skeptical. Some were angry that they hadn’t been invited or hadn’t had enough notice, some didn’t like who was involved, and because the mayor had been vocal about his view on Buc-ee’s, some people saw my willingness to work with him as evidence that I must somehow be on his side.
So I started getting notes: Who is paying for this? Why are you in my community? Why are you working with this mayor? Are you in the pocket of Big Buc-ee’s? I don’t need your book. We don’t need civility here.
People wanted me to pick a side. They wanted me to litigate what had happened, decide who had behaved badly, who had been uncivil, who was right about Buc-ee’s and who was wrong.
And I wasn’t going to do that, because that isn’t my role. I don’t come into a community to arbitrate every past grievance or tell people whose anger is justified. I want to partner with leaders, institutions and communities who want to build, and ask what they can build now, what kind of community they want to be when this particular fight is over.
So I wrote back to people who were angry with me and told them I hoped they would come. I wanted to meet them in person. It was an earnest invitation, because if this was going to mean anything, we needed those voices in the room, too.
The part I couldn’t have planned
A few months ago, after our June retreat, the mayor’s wife was telling some fellow citizens about what had happened, including a woman named Becky Albright, a lonngtime Palmer Lake Resident. When she mentioned that I had just been in town and had written The Soul of Civility, Becky said: You’re joking. I know that book!
A year earlier, Becky had encountered The Soul of Civility, had it recommended to her in several different places, read it with people at her church, and thought: This is what our community needs.
She had actually put together an entire proposal and taken it to the mayors of Palmer Lake and neighboring Monument, asking whether they could use the book as a launchpad for healing in these two deeply interconnected communities. At the time, the political will wasn’t there, the idea was put on hold, and things got worse.
And then, a year later, entirely independently of anything Becky had tried to do, I showed up in Palmer Lake.
I love that.
I love that she had found the book, read it with her church, looked around at what was happening in her own community and tried to do something with it, and then a year later discovered that somehow the author of this same book had wandered into Palmer Lake without either of us having any idea that the other existed.
Becky has now spent the past few months leading an initiative to bring Palmer Lake and Monument together, and tonight I’ll be back. I’ll do a book signing at Covered Treasures, a wonderful local bookstore, and then we’ll head across the street to the Chamber of Commerce in Monument, where I’ll give a few framing remarks before we get to work.
We’re going to sit around tables together and ask some hard questions about why people live there, what they love about this place, what problems they see, what has been lost, what their communities need and what they could actually build together. Tonight also launches a Palmer Lake and Monument community read of *The Soul of Civility* that will continue through Christmas.
And maybe some of the Buc-ee’s haters will be there, maybe even some of the people who thought I was in the pocket of Big Buc-ee’s, and I hope they come. I’ll gladly tell them that I’m not, and I’ll gladly invite them into the conversation with us, because we need all of those voices there.
Tomorrow, Colorado Springs
Tomorrow I’ll be in Colorado Springs with Lori and Lisa and Reclaiming Civility for something they have been working toward for years, their own version of the Carmel Civility Summit that helped inspire all of this in the first place.
They are gathering leaders from across the Pikes Peak region for a full-day civility summit, culminating in a civility pledge for public leaders. Colorado Springs has had its own divisions in recent years, within the City Council and between the council and the mayor, and yet Lori and Lisa have managed to bring people across those divisions together around civility, with both the mayor and City Council supporting a proclamation around the initiative last week.
I find that incredible, not because the disagreements have disappeared, because they haven’t and they shouldn’t have to, but because that has never been my argument about civility in the first place. The question is what we do with one another when the disagreement remains.
From Colorado I head to Nashville this weekend for the Global Free Speech Summit, where I’ll be talking about free speech, antisemitism and campus culture, and thinking again about that student at St. Ambrose who was afraid to discover what her classmates believed. The weekend after that, I’ll be speaking at the Front Porch Republic conference, and later in October I’ll be at St. Luke’s United Methodist Church back home in Indianapolis.
Things are happening very fast right now, and I don’t always have time to keep you all up to date on them as they happen, but looking back at Iowa last week and ahead to Colorado this week, I keep thinking about how different all of these communities are and how differently these ideas have found their way into them.
Bob found his way to Carmel, took the ideas home to Urbandale, and a year later nearly 400 people were sitting in an auditorium talking about what kind of community they wanted to be. Joseph read the book and built a course, a cohort and now a certification program at St. Ambrose. Becky found the book entirely on her own, read it with her church, tried to bring it to Palmer Lake, and then, a year later, discovered that I had somehow shown up there anyway. Lori and Lisa read it, reached out to me, and have spent years building Reclaiming Civility in Colorado Springs.
I could never have planned all of that, and increasingly, that is what I love most about this season: watching these ideas leave the pages of a book and become something that belongs to other people, who take them into their own cities and universities and churches and institutions and make something with them that I could never have made myself.
So wish me luck, and come say hi at any of these stops along the way. And if you happen to be in Palmer Lake tonight, especially if you think I’m in the pocket of Big Buc-ee’s, please come. I’d love to meet you.
Thank you for being part of the Civic Renaissance Community!
