Behind the scenes: A guest post by Mitchell Nee
President's note: Mitchell Nee is in his junior year at Wheaton College. In July he volunteered as a production assistant on set for the filming of the upcoming Ideos documentary "Dialogue Lab: America". We are grateful to publish this reflection he wrote as a special guest installment for this month's President's Perspective.
By Mitchell Nee
Full disclosure: I may be the least qualified person to work on a movie about political polarization. It’s not because I’m apathetic toward world problems – there are several issues that I’m very passionate about – and it’s not because I’m not uninformed about politics. No, my lack of qualification stems from one of my fatal flaws: When I’m frustrated, it’s depressingly easy for me to envision myself as the political happy medium. In my imagination, those who share my political beliefs are all informed, level-headed, and successful; those who exist several deviations away from myself in either direction resemble the belligerent, misinformed people whose rants I view on the Internet.
Moreover, when I’m in these moods, I don’t want to get out of them. There’s something addictive about complaining about others; Bill Watterson said it best when Calvin told Hobbes, “It’s a lot more fun to blame things than to fix them.” And, when I find myself in these moods, nothing irritates me more than hearing calls from others to “heal the divide” or “unite the country” -- these pleas for unity inevitably come off as either naïve fantasies or hollow words, spoken to pay insidious lip service to one of the few bipartisan issues left in this country: our own fragmented nature. With all that said, the prospect of being a production assistant on a movie about political polarization made me uncomfortable. I felt like a fraud compared to the many optimistic, driven people who were working with Ideos to bring people together through this film.
On the first day of shooting (Friday), I was tasked with welcoming participants to the studio for their pre-interviews and taking their temperatures. Armed with a clipboard and a thermometer, I installed myself outside the studio’s door and waited for each cast member to arrive. To pass the time, I called my friends, scribbled Tic-Tac-Toe games on my hands, and committed each participant’s dietary restrictions to memory. I also spent time envisioning how each participant would act based on what I knew about their respective political beliefs.
For all my imagination, however, I eventually found my first impressions to be anticlimactic. I’m not sure what I was expecting – I certainly didn’t anticipate the extreme behavior, tantrums, or outbursts that I was accustomed to seeing on my social media feed – but at the same time, it felt strange to see everyone in the flesh, and not concepts in my mind. I took someone’s temperature, recorded it on my sheet, and walked them up the stairs. Rinse and repeat, for all 12 participants.
OK, I thought. They seem nice! It didn’t take long before a mischievous voice in me spoke up: It’ll be fun to see the sparks fly later.
But Saturday and Sunday came, and things didn’t prove as explosive as my inner anarchist wished. Nobody got up in arms while I served them. Instead, most everyone was gracious and kind and chatty. In fact, I saw several parties talk with each other so much that our producer had to remind them to stop. Gradually, I found myself disarmed by the lack of conflict or hostility. Since I was afraid that I would unwittingly pollute the audio or ruin a shot, I took refuge in a separate room, away from the crew. In the end, I only witnessed the final round of the Dialogue Lab, where participants laid out their fears for America and explained some of the political issues nearest to their hearts. I was grateful for that chance.
And then the shooting concluded. The crew popped a bottle of champagne, and we all hastened to pack up our belongings and vacate the premises. The participants went their separate ways, and a few weeks later I realized that I didn’t really know them as well as I’d hoped. How easy would it have been to start up a conversation while I was serving them food or coffee? And wherever they are now, are they are using what they learned over their weekend with Ideos to better a corner of the world?
I don’t know what the future holds for America, but efforts like the Dialogue Lab show that all is not lost. President Carter once declared America to be “not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic,” and I find his sentiments to be inspiring. That doesn’t mean that I think that there aren’t Americans clinging to poisonous opinions. I also don’t mean to say that in its current state, America is some sort of unrealized utopia with various groups that live in their own separate, benign spheres.
And yet...
And yet, Carter is right in calling our mosaic beautiful, because I got to see that most people sincerely want peace, love, and happiness for our fellow man in the world; we just differ in how we intend to accomplish this. One may look across our mosaic and only see lines designed for the purposes of tribalism, lines erected to keep others out or lines drawn up for battle. But another more hopeful soul may see something else entirely -- people who want to share their hopes, dreams, fears, insecurities, beliefs, and culture with one another, with you and me.