Jill Konrath [22:39]: So one of your key messages is to find the commonality with others. I mean, not to stay as the enemies, but to create conversations, to create opportunities to be together as human beings, to find out what you share.
And we do share so much in common, but the lines are drawn, and we're so ready to jump in and correct people.
Tom Morris [23:05]: You're right. And so, if a person opens my book, The Everyday Patriot, they won't see names of current politicians. They won't see the names of current political figures.
I take them back to the founders, 1776. I take them back to Aristotle, a millennium and more before that. I take them out of the battle, back to the guy's father and the guy's grandfather and the guy's great grandfather politically.
I'm taking them back to the grandfathers and grandmothers, like Abigail Adams, wife of John Adams, who played such an important part in this whole nation getting launched that people didn't even know about.
But I take people out of the fray, beyond the squabbles, back to the values we all agree on. Who doesn't somehow embrace life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
And so, I bring everybody together around these values. Let's find out what we all share in common, and we can build something from there.
Jill Konrath [24:03]: Tom, you mentioned that the two people in the food line working with different politics. I recently heard the guy who's in charge of Habitat for Humanity, the CEO, and he was talking about taking a lot of Vietnam War vets to Vietnam to build houses with the people they had fought against decades earlier.
He said it was the most healing experience of all for both sides, and all the anger and angst and tension of all those years and came together and they worked together, and they found community partnership.
Tom Morris [24:46]: That's a beautiful story. I'm proud of that. The president of Habitat, he and I went to UNC Chapel Hill on the same scholarship. We're not the same age, so we didn't know each other there, but we call each other cousins.
We were on the Moorhead Kane Scholarship and all Moorhead Canes all over the world, 3500 of us, I think we call each other cousins. So, it's good to hear a cousin doing something like that.
Jill Konrath [25:07]: Yeah, it was really great to hear.
Tom Morris [25:09]: We need a bus trip from blue states to red states and vice versa.
Jill Konrath [25:13]: Well, let me just even say what I extrapolated from when he said that the reality of it right now, at least in the United States, the people don't mix.
There are racial groups, there are economic groups, and there's very little twain that shall meet in terms of school districts, kids don't see kids, like from other ethnic groups or from other economic groups.
They don't see it. So, it affects everything. And so, the need for us to know the other is greater today than it's ever been because of the lack of diversity that we have in our everyday life and our work environments and stuff.
Tom Morris [25:55]: You're right. We occasionally have retreats here at the beach in Wilmington, North Carolina, where people come from around the country and sometimes farther away. One retreat we had, it was a small retreat, 25 people, less than 30 people.
But around the table we had two teenagers, 18-year-old Moria Kane scholars at Chapel Hill kids. We had people in their twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, and sixties. And everybody was remarking, when are you ever at a table with that many decades of life represented?
And the 60-year-olds were both Washington DC. Attorneys. They were saying, these kids are so smart. And the kids were saying, these 60-year-olds are so smart.
It's like, we've got to break down these barriers to build something new. And at a time when we've been talking about walls a lot, we need to be talking about bridges because there is a social analog of our infrastructure needs in America, and we have serious infrastructure needs physically, but we have them communally, socially, economically. We need to build those bridges.
Jill Konrath [27:03]: So, one of the things you said earlier that The Odyssey and The Iliad taught—one of them was partnership, and the other one was purpose.
Tom Morris [27:12]: Yeah.
Jill Konrath [27:13]: So, you think that one of the things that we as citizens need is to have a purpose rather than just throwing up arms and saying, “God damn it. What's going on with this country?”
I was just out with a woman the other day who told me that she felt like there was no hope—that there was no hope, that it had gone too far and there was no way, and the country was going to collapse.
And I'm saying, “If you don't believe there's hope, then nothing can be done. But there are a lot of other possibilities out there that people aren't even considering about what can be done.”
Tom Morris [27:46]: And this is so important that you brought this up, the idea of hope, because there's this old story from ancient Greece, but they discovered a lot of important things. There's a story we call the Story of Pandora's Box.
Jill Konrath [28:00]: I’ve heard that one.
Tom Morris [28:00]: Pandora's Box. Right? But the Greek version was not properly translated. There was a mistranslation along the way.
So, I used to read this story, Pandora's Box. She's given a box, a gift box, and she's told, don't open the box. Now, what kind of a gift is it if you're given a gift box—then you're told not to open it. That makes no sense. But it's a big jar she's given, and maybe the lid is just ornamental. So, she's told not to open the jar, just to enjoy the jar.
But she has the quality of curiosity. She opens the jar, and the story goes that every possible evil comes flying out of the jar, and they disperse around the world. Right.
What does Pandora do? She has not only endless curiosity—which is a very important human quality—she also has the second quality of courage.
So, she goes back to look into the jar a second time—and that's why we have the story—because she sees one thing left in the jar stuck to the bottom. And that is hope.
Jill Konrath [29:11]: Really? I don't remember. I just remember all the ills.
Tom Morris [29:15]: That's the full story. The last thing in the jar was hope. She had to go through all the other stuff first to get to the most precious thing of all, the thing that would help her handle everything else.
Jill Konrath [29:27]: Wow.
Tom Morris [29:28]: And so I've said, even before I knew the details of that story, I used to say to people decades ago, the worse things get, the more of an optimist I become.
And people would always say, what sense does that make? And I would say people can tolerate unbelievably bad circumstances once they get used to it. But when things get literally intolerable, it's a wakeup call to everybody. And everybody says, “Okay, we’ve got to do something about this.”
Jill Konrath [29:58]: We’ve got to do something.