Walking Home in Silence

John Heckel

With Poetry from American Silos

Michael Bickford

How could what happened have happened?

I was born in Germany immediately after World War II. I spent much of my early childhood asking questions. How could you have let this happen? Didn’t you know what was going on? Questions that received very few acceptable answers. Our family immigrated to the United States in 1954.

Now I was asked questions to which I could give very few acceptable answers. How could your parents have let that happen? Didn’t they know what was going on?

It was not until my 21^st birthday (1967) that I found out, through a confessional conversation with my mother, that my father had been a member of The Young Communist League of Germany. As a member, his activities included distributing party newspapers, painting anti-Nazi graffiti-slogans, posting anti-Nazi posters and agitprop ( political propaganda ) theatre. As a result of his activities, he was arrested and sent to Kemna Concentration Camp in 1933, a mere 30 miles from his hometown. Prisoners and guards came from the same neighborhoods. They knew each other. When Hitler closed the camp on January 19, 1934, guards and prisoners walked back home to the same neighborhoods. Two grotesquely different world views were walking home in silence, neither questioning the other until many decades later.

It seems questioning extreme moments of polarization is coded into my DNA.

An Attempt at Understanding Polarization

Through the modern wonder of social media, I left my confirmation-bias-bubble and learned, in the fall of 2020, of the countless folks I went to high school with who were now avid and open Trump supporters. So, I reached out, in an attempt to understand how it was that we had drifted so far apart, with the proposition that we discuss our differences, with particular emphasis on events in our lives that had led us to those differing world views.

My Post of September 10, 2020:

I went to high school from 1960 to 1964. A wonderful and remarkable aspect of social media is the ability to stay connected with friends and colleagues from long ago. I have around twenty-five or so friends from those high school days, of those some 40% have come out adamantly and publicly for Trump. These are all people who went to a university, are all, if not well off, financially comfortable.

I openly admit I have gone through our Maine West 1964 yearbook, looking at your faces. Yes, Ruth, Tom, Steve, Kieth, Lou and others, you know who you are. I did, I looked you up, re-read about the activities we shared, the plays and V-shows we did together. I did all this in a desperate attempt to understand where our thoughts, insights and views became so polarized.

Help me understand. Were we that different back then and we simply didn’t know? If not, what was the turning/tipping point?

I long to understand. I do not want to change your mind. I know nothing I can say will do that. I invite your opinion, not about Trump, but about how we became so polarized.

I invite you to a dialogue between people who came of age in the early sixties, in the suburbs of Chicago, who went to football games together, who built homecoming flo

ats together, whose heart skipped a beat when Maureen was chosen homecoming queen….and all those other coming of age initiations….now grown into elders who cannot speak to each other with civility when it comes to Trump… What happened?

To suggest my invitation was a failure would be an understatement. My attempt at creating a dialogue triggered six months of sarcasm, vitriol and anger. I ignorantly expected a group of seventy-plus-year-olds to be able to do something our American-White-Patriarchal culture not only does not encourage but actively discourages: to engage across our differences.

I cite two examples as being indicative of the offensive and divisive language, attitude, and emotion as well as group stereotyping my request engendered—

Posted September 11, 2020

“I believe they are just uneducated and untrained in empathy for anyone who is not just like them (aka white, Christian, selfish.) BTW, I would be amazed if you get any responses—in my experience, none of them will answer questions like yours—they are only comfortable in packs.”

From the other side—

Posted September 12, 2020

“Of course, you are aware that the majority of abortions are of black babies and the Dems are ok with KILLING a baby AFTER it is born. Yes. There are many of us. We will not be bullied by the Dems who think they are the elites and we better listen…..or else.

Nice talking to you, John!!!

My initial attempt at opening a dialogue for understanding felt like a complete failure.

I would discover several years later the necessary elements for any real understanding, active listening, and speaking with intention.

A More Thought-out Attempt at Understanding Polarization

I write a monthly column on aging for a Northern California newspaper and have been doing so since 1995. I often find ways to process personal issues through writing that column, and I did so with the despair I felt with that first disastrous attempt at dialogue.

Attempts at self-discovery do not always move in straight and direct lines. They sometimes travel in mysterious and circuitous routes. My post on social media, the resulting vitriol, and my column were read by a former undergraduate colleague of mine in Portland, Oregon, Dick Dezeeuw. He and I had attended Drake University together in the mid 60’s and had been members of the same fraternity. He sent me an email.

Posted August 21, 2021:

John- You may not remember me, but I was a Pike at Drake a year or so behind you. I was inspired by your column and postings last year about reaching out to old friends and acquaintances to discuss how you had similar early lives but now have such different world views. Want to try again?

I responded with an enthusiastic affirmation.

We soon recruited another fraternity brother, Rick Sline, living in Florida, and the three of us set off on a three-month journey to find a structure for dialoguing around what divides us and form a working zoom group that would agree to follow and experiment with that structure.

First meeting November 11, 2021

We quickly agreed the most difficult task in our experiment would be forming and then facilitating a group to share polarizing world views. Since I had almost no contact with any of the proposed participants, I relied on the judgement of my two colleagues. They did have history with the potential participants and based on that history we invited forty fraternity brothers to participate. Twelve accepted immediately, four declined and the rest did not respond to our emailed invitations. Our assessment was that our group of twelve provided the diversity of world views needed to make our experiment work.

The initial meeting of the group focused on a basic understanding of Zoom protocols, personal histories and updates on what everyone had been doing since graduating from Drake University fifty some years ago, and an explanation of the structured dialogues we intended to follow. Our initial assessment about diversity of world views proved mostly correct. After three men dropped out before the first meeting, we were nine, of which five were liberal leaning participants, and four adamant Trump supporters. Everyone agreed to meet for 90 minutes every two weeks.

Facilitators agreed to create and send out via email dialogue topics at least three days before meeting. As facilitators we also took on the responsibility of creating and then enforcing a structure that we believed had a chance of successfully holding and containing the emotions triggered by our planned dialogues.

Meeting Structure and Hopes for that Structure

As facilitators we formulated the following meeting structure:

Facilitator’s Introduction

Re-Introduction of meeting topic as previously sent via email, reminder of structure and explanation or cause of anyone missing.

First Round:

Participants each have three minutes of uninterrupted speaking time to share their view regarding the stated topic. The hope is that providing participants with no cross-talking time, to express their views, will develop a willingness to share and create a meaningful level of vulnerability. Facilitators will choose first person to speak who will then choose the next speaker. A silent pause of 15 seconds between each speaker, during which time participants are encouraged to write down clarifying questions for round three. No cross-talking.

Facilitator Remarks:

Second round is re-introduced, restating the self-reflective process of finding events in our earlier years that shaped or influenced the stated world views of round one.

Second Round:

Participants each have three minutes of uninterrupted speaking time to share their thoughts on what life experiences have shaped or influenced their views as expressed in round one. The hope is that establishing a relationship between worldviews (first round) and actual lived experiences (second round) invites empathy and understanding. Facilitators will choose first person to speak and then that person will choose the next participant. A silent pause of 15 seconds between speakers, during which time participants are encouraged to write down clarifying questions for round three. No cross talk.

Facilitator Remarks:

Third round is introduced with the guideline of asking questions for clarification and not for argumentation or disagreement. Participants are reminded that the inflection pattern and tone of their questions are as important as the question’s word choice. The hope is that stressing “questions for clarification” will invite curious and information-seeking questions rather than reactive ones.

Third Round:

Depending on time considerations, the Third Round is 15 or so minutes of clarifying questions.

Facilitator Remarks:

Final wrap and a reminder of our next scheduled meeting.

Shared Facilitator Responsibility:

Responsibility for remarks and enforcement of the structure is always shared equally among facilitators. Our hope is that in each session we model individual voices within a supportive collective.

Language Choices that Encourage Understanding

From the very start we agreed as facilitators we would also participate in each meeting’s dialogue. We also agreed that our language choices would be critical to the potential success of our project and that as participants, we have an important role in modeling those language choices. Adopting neutral and inviting language choices that encourage understanding is critical for our group cohesiveness and ultimate success. Clarifying questions was a particular fortuitous choice and dialogue was another.

The consistent use of the word dialogue to describe our process soon had a profound effect on our participants and their use of language. We are interested in language that nurtures understanding. We shared with the participants the basis for its use in the spirit of David Bohm, Donald Factor and Peter Garrett (1991) from Dialogue–A Proposal:

Dialogue, as we are choosing to use the word, is a way of exploring the roots of the many crises that face humanity today. It enables inquiry into, and understanding of, the sorts of processes that fragment and interfere with real communication between individuals, nations and even different parts of the same organization. In our modern culture men and women are able to interact with one another in many ways: they can sing, dance or play together with little difficulty, but their ability to talk together about subjects that matter deeply to them seems invariably to lead to dispute, division and often to violence (david-bohm.net).

On a personal note, the transformative power of genuine dialogue has been part of my consciousness since pursuing a PhD in psychology. It was also an essential aspect of my dissertation on transgressive gender performances. My belief in the self-reflective and transformative power of dialogue is rooted in my work in both theatre and psychology.

Of all the reminders that we as facilitators suggested to individual participants, “Please, use language that encourages understanding”, was by far the most frequent. All too often participants’ language choices and inflection patterns hindered understanding. I offer more thoughts on language choices in the following section on learnings.

Participants

The 1960’s was a decade of profound transition and transformation. Our participants experienced those transitions, and many found them transformative. From the early to mid-sixties, our group collectively experienced it all: fraternity parties, letterman jackets, and basketball games—and then in the late sixties and early seventies draft card burning, long hair war protests, along with those who enlisted and served with commitment. Half our group served in the military and half demonstrated and protested the war.

We are all straight white men with at least one university degree. Some comment on this seems appropriate. We’ve had several intense dialogues addressing the early racist and homophobic nature of all-white-straight fraternities and the role we played in that culture. Not an easy dialogue to be sure, but necessary, given the nature and history of our group. They seemed, to me, to have been productive.

Participants in our group include a retired pharmacist, a nearly retired attorney who argued in front of the Supreme Court, two PhDs and several retired financial advisors. We are almost all retired and, in my estimate, comfortable financially. Most of us are grandfathers, some of us have been married three times, and some married to the same person for over fifty years.

Some of us find meaning in God through organized religion, others have found a more individualized path towards spirituality, still others reject religion and spirituality outright.

Every one of us has experienced moments of deep personal self-reflection and insight during the more than three years of our dialogues. All have expressed how much they value these meetings.

Topics

As of May 14, 2025 our dialogue group has met 73 times. We are now a group of eleven, in that we added two new members to the original group of nine in early January of 2025. We continue to tackle difficult polarizing topics. The previously outlined meeting structure has stayed pretty much the same. It has allowed us to share thoughts and feelings on very divisive topics.

As the level of vulnerability has increased so have topics, and as the number of topics have increased so have our learnings. (See Let the Men Speak)

Learnings

The following learnings are the result of various inputs and observations. As facilitators, Rick, Dick and I would meet for fifteen or so minutes after each dialogue. During these post-session debriefs, we share our immediate, often, emotional reactions. We also always meet at least once in between group dialogues to further discussions and observations and plan the next polarizing topic. We also, twice, responded to each other’s observations and learnings via prolonged written email exchanges.

On an annual basis, we also asked the group for feedback in the form of questionnaires, which were sent out during each year of our meetings. We continually asked for feedback regarding the structure of our meetings. Was the structure limiting, constrictive or in any way restricting their abilities to be vulnerable with their responses? Feedback was always supportive and grateful for our enforcement of that structure. Some of our learnings were influenced by that feedback. (See Let the Men Speak.)

Shared Commonality

A shared commonality was the reason the group was brought together. Group members shared a foundational commonality in attending the same university and membership in the same fraternity. The hope was that these commonalities created a preliminary basis for bonding while also lessening the tendency to otherize and polarize.

Sharing a basis in group commonality greatly facilitates discussions across individual differences. Some expressed and experienced commonality, be it membership in the same church, same service organization, same fraternity or having attended the same university. These common backgrounds and touchpoints grounded and allowed for a more authentic and vulnerable exploration of differences. The commonality carries weight and significance especially, in the first several dialogues and early stages of group development. The shared commonality must be experiential not simply theoretical, that is, rooted in readily identifiable shared experiences.

Recognition of Triggering Life Events:

Many basic world views, such as the ones that so acutely divide our country, are set into motion or triggered by long ago life experiences. Worldviews expressed at 75 might easily have been formed by life events that occurred at 15. The patience and tolerance necessary to truly listen to and understand a subjectively objectionable expressed world view is increased if the listener can consciously hold that those world views are often derived from life experiences that took place long ago. Hearing another’s direct experience also decreases the need to argue the speaker out of their held position.

Every dialogue has focused on both world views and life experiences that might lead to those world views. As our time together has increased, so has the significance the men place on life experiences. They seem slowly to be becoming more interested in examining those triggering life experiences. Sharing and hearing life experiences invites us into another person’s reality, generating an empathetic bridge.

The Security of Commonality: During dialogues that explore emotionally packed differences, it is helpful to never drift far away from what the group holds in common. Taking time out to focus on that commonality, the shared experience of the university, church, fraternity or service club—tends to solidify the ground on which the dialogues on differences stand. In moments of discomfort or after moments of vulnerability, dialogue participants will, on their own initiative, if the structure allows, move to reconnecting on that shared commonality.

Group Structure as Ritual

If given the opportunity, the structure of the dialogues will take on many aspects of ritual. Effective ritual provides a safe container, a known and trusted holding space, for participants. Due to the emotional safety provided by a familiar structure, participants can take greater emotional risks in sharing and exploring polarizing subjects together.

Our participants gradually adopted and acted in ways to encourage each other to follow the agreed upon structure and find in that form significance and meaning. Group members came to feel safety in the group structure, becoming not only observers but defenders of it.

An example–our group took the simple act of taking 15 seconds of silence between speakers and made it their own. Slowly over many sessions each participant began to verbalize taking those 15 seconds—” I am now going to wait 15 seconds!” or “I am going to take 15 seconds of silence.” Each wording slightly different, but each took responsibility with the word “I.” As of May 2025 every participant introduces their 15 seconds of silence, thereby each claiming ownership and commitment to the structure.

Language that Furthers Understanding:

The larger societal milieu in which our group is situated operates in a confirmational-bias-bubble that does not encourage the use of language for understanding across differences. Due to this societal conditioning, careless language choices can easily provoke argumentative responses and laughter. Language choices which engage sarcasm as a communication tool come easily but do little to further understanding. Choices that vulnerably encouraged understanding came much harder.

It may be that our identities, our egos, are more steeped in uses of language that encourage argumentative response rather than language that invites understanding. We may have become accustomed to people listening for response and are not comfortable with people listening for understanding.

Even though we, as facilitators, consistently expressed and defined the concept of clarifying questions, participants often fell back on argumentative or self-advancing questions. It is easy to embed commentary and opinion within the phrasing of a question. After more than three years of work, section three of our dialogue structure—Clarifying Questions—still causes the group the greatest difficulty. Listening for understanding takes energy. It is an active form of listening. Speaking for understanding and choosing language that you believe fosters understanding also takes extra care and energy. It may very well be that the men in our group, when it came to the clarifying question section, let go—relaxed—let their guard down and related in more habitually familiar ways.

In that relaxation, they reverted to old comfortable-slipper ways and thus emerged an old boy banter that included sarcasm, misogyny and descriptive phrases that tended to discourage understanding and encourage self-promotion.

The Clarifying Question section also proves to be the most challenging to facilitation skills. While enforcement during the first two sections is simple and straight forward, enforcement in the Clarifying Questions section is much more difficult. Often, quick instantaneous judgement calls are asked for. Also complicating the dynamic are emotional reactions to a participant’s self-promoting banter.

An example might better illustrate. During a December 2024 session whose theme was Trump’s recent election victory, a participant referring to Harris, said the following: “Everyone knows she just spread her legs to get to where she is!”. My emotional reaction was instantaneous, somatic and intense. I lost control of my breathing and felt a heavy weight on my chest. Somehow, and I really do not know how, I found the ability to stop the conversation and question the statement based on its ability to “encourage understanding.” By questioning his word choice and not him or the factual reliability of his statement, I was able to get him to rephrase his statement and move it from self-promoting, misogynist banter to something that asked for understanding. He was able to communicate his belief that she did not obtain her position based on merit.

If any part of the clarifying questions section is successful, it is so because it allows the men to move back to commonality. Often after vulnerable first rounds, in this section, the men move back to joking or reminiscing about what we had in common. Questions and stories about Drake or Des Moines, the Varsity Movie Theatre and of course the fraternity all have a solid grounding effect after the shared vulnerability of the first two rounds.

Structure and Enforcement of that Structure:

Structure and the enforcement of that structure can provide the sense of security and the before-mentioned ritual, that is necessary for any meaningful and vulnerable sharing to occur. Facilitators who are willing to enforce the rules, who are willing to call out participants who are not following the agreed upon guidelines, help provide that security. Feedback from our participants consistently thanked us for the structure and our active enforcement of that structure.

Let the Men Speak:

During each year of our group dialogues, we asked the participants for feedback. We sent them a questionnaire and requested they give meaningful thought to their answers. The feedback was extensive, thought out and often very vulnerable. The following is sample of that feedback. Each quote comes from a different participant.

• Listening: My ability to listen objectively, with an open mind has improved. It seems to be a learned skill.  I find I get much more out of a conversation by listening to what is being said rather than judging the person speaking and preparing a response to what they are saying. Following with questions about how that person came to that belief is the more interesting part of the conversation. This has carried beyond the group.
• The reason someone holds the world view that they do is often based on life events that happened long ago. Knowing and holding that increases my patience when listening to someone express views with which I strongly disagree.
• I became aware from this Zoom group that I view the world through a negative lens and have made many life decisions based on my need to be accepted and valued. I now know I need to get out of my funk by finding ways to volunteer and get more active in my community.
• A number of the group have expressed how much satisfaction they get through volunteer efforts.  I have found this to be true and have increased the amount of volunteer work I do with homeless and other community efforts.
• I wonder if people have a true sense of being heard, do they feel genuinely listened to? I tend to think not. Even in the shortest of interactions with people I now want them to feel heard.
• I have re-learned from this experience the importance of being a mindful listener in an attempt to understand before expecting to be understood.
• Very little of the group’s discussion has been about career accomplishments.  A number of members have had great financial success, but the conversations generally center around family and other personal interests. This is reassuring to me because I worked primarily in the public sector and haven’t accumulated a lot of financial wealth. My career did allow me to make contributions that I am proud of, but money is not one of those things.
• I’ve actually experienced from this group what I’ve known and taught—that people differ in their willingness and/or ability to disclose, even in a relatively safe environment that we’ve attempted to create.
• People are really different than their beliefs. I have learned how to listen and look for what is underneath or behind views being expressed.

Application of Group Learnings

While our experiment continues via Zoom, my focus and concerns are more local and in person. My concern is that local organizations that can provide the bond of commonality are missing the mark. Churches, civic groups and local university and junior college programs like the Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes are remiss. They are missing an opportunity to play a vital role in bridging our current national cultural divide. They could provide the common ground necessary for the speaking and understanding of difference.

We have learned that the shared commonality that makes possible listening and understanding extremely different world views must be one made from choice. The commonalty that grounds us must be the result of a voluntary choice we have made. Our group had all chosen to attend Drake University and to pledge the same fraternity. That common choice created the bond that made listening to and understanding difficult views possible.

Members of local church groups and civic organizations are members by choice. They have chosen to attend the Baptist church on the corner or to become members of the local Chamber of Commerce. The bond of a common choice can create an atmosphere that allows for the understanding of potentially divisive differences. Several of us have taken on that challenge—to engage local organizations that can provide the commonality that allows for understanding across difference. We are in the process of sharing our learnings, our structure and our enthusiasm.

Concluding Personal Notes

From the Poet:

At our regular meeting, two weeks after the 2024 election, John and I shared our reactions—his in the form of a developing essay, and mine in the form of a poem I had written the day after the election and read to an audience the very next evening. As we shared what we had, we quickly realized that my poem—if expanded to be more than a response from my own silo, but to encompass my understanding of those in their red ones—would integrate well with his essay.

John and I choose excerpts from the resulting poem, and placed selected stanzas within the piece. The original poem, My Blue Silo, appears at the end of this article, and the entire poem, American Silos, can been found here.

From the essayist:

How long our group continues to dialogue is a mystery. We are getting older. People will die.

Somehow, for each of us, the process of aging has benefitted from our continued attempts at understanding each other. I think aging, as a process, responds to and values the attempt.

The dialogue session we had immediately following the November election was by far the most difficult for me, and yes, I did write a column about that difficulty. The election results caused me to question all that I hold dear and identify with. I identified as someone who thought he knew what was going on. I was wrong. So wrong! How could my perceptions of reality have been so mistaken. I tried but failed to communicate that during the first dialogue after the election. The election was a binary choice. There were winners and losers. For more than three years now we have been working on breaking down the binary, searching for the crack in between, the one where the light comes in. Yes, I find great comfort in Leonard Cohen; but here we were faced with the starkest of binaries. It was difficult. But we continue, we continue to listen and speak for understanding. Our aging process benefits from the attempt.

Over the years I have learned the joys of letting myself discover the self-reflective journey that can be writing. Writing with a desire to communicate. I have attempted to do so here. I cannot, like my father, be part of two grotesquely different world views walking home in silence, neither questioning the other until many decades later.