The New Yorker published a lengthy article this week, The Meltdown at a Middle School in a Liberal Town, about the heated controversy at Amherst Regional Middle School last year over counselors’ response to trans students.

“Many people in the Amherst district describe a community that has become habituated to outrage – addicted to conflict and reprisal,” author Jessica Winter wrote. “Here, as in so many pockets of America these days, conflict doesn’t seem to be part of a difficult journey toward resolution; rather, conflict often appears to be the entire point.”

Last month, Amherst witnessed another “meltdown” as the Town Council considered a resolution demanding a ceasefire in Gaza. Subsequent flare-ups over the allocation of federal money and the regional school budget raise the question of how we process conflict.

The Amherst Current would like to initiate a discussion of how we can engage in respectful dialogue about contentious issues. So we’ve asked members of our advisory board to open this debate, and we hope readers will provide their own reactions by posting comments.

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David Porter: How to Mitigate Conflict in 4 Easy Steps:

1. Look in the mirror. You’re not infallible, and you’re not always right. Remember this.
2. Defeat and rejection are a part of life (try writing for a living, you’ll see). Whether it’s a presidential election or a town council vote, if your side loses, regroup and do better next time.
3. Never assume you know someone’s intent or motives unless they tell you, or unless you’re a mind-reader or clairvoyant. (If you’re the latter, please let me know if UConn is going to cover the spread Monday night). 
4. Before judging someone based on their age, race or sex, put yourself in their shoes. It can’t actually be done, of course, but we have to try. It’s our only hope.

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Connie Kruger: The New Yorker article pulls together a lot of what was claimed to have happened and reactions from different quarters about a difficult set of issues that arose in our schools not too long ago. Divisions in Amherst do not fall into left/right or conservative/liberal but manifest around local issues. The anger and acrimony is deeply felt and one political battle often carries over to the next.

At a recent talk by Illana Redstone, she spoke of “social trust.” Without a rebuilding of social trust in each other and our local institutions, we will continue to see events through our own lens of race, class, gender identity, or personal experiences, and continue to ascribe ill intent and suspect motivations to those in town who see things differently.

I’m interested in finding ways we can rebuild social trust while continuing the commitment to social justice that undergirds our shared values.

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Nick Grabbe: Amherst has seen a lot of heated rhetoric over the years, from the parking garage wars of the 1990s to the charter battles of 2003-05 and 2016-18. But something in our public life has changed. Some of us have become more vituperative, more unyielding, more angry.

From the “meltdown” at the middle school to the hostility over the Gaza cease-fire to the hounding of public officials, we have witnessed a breakdown of civility. The hot buttons of race and gender have complicated our debates, and Donald Trump has normalized acrimony and vindictiveness.

So how can we promote peace? We can recognize that elected and appointed officials (too many of whom have quit) are our neighbors and are doing the best they can. We can gracefully concede when our viewpoint doesn’t prevail. We can realize that brutality in politics makes it harder to convince good people to serve. 

And we can nurture a community of kindness and respect instead of discord and entitlement.

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Andy Churchill: I think the idea of “calling in” rather than “calling out,” promoted by Smith College professor Loretta Ross, is a pretty transformative mindset. A New York Times article about it described it this way: “Calling out assumes the worst. Calling in involves conversation, compassion and context. It doesn’t mean a person should ignore harm, slight or damage, but nor should she, he or they exaggerate it.”

There’s a pretty good “taxonomy of call-out culture” by YouTuber Natalie Wynn mentioned in the article:

• Presumption of guilt (without facts or nuance getting in the way),
• Essentialism (when criticism of bad behavior becomes criticism of a bad person),
• Pseudo-intellectualism (proclaiming one’s moral high ground),
• Unforgivability (no apology is good enough), and
• Contamination (guilt by association).

Amherst’s conflicts in some ways reflect our broader society’s culture. But they are also difficult because the issues are complex, with multiple sides holding different perspectives and feeling threatened for different reasons. Maybe if we realize we are all in this together, assume we can learn additional nuances of each situation from others, and accept the need for compromise, we can get somewhere. 

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Stephen Schreiber: Amherst would benefit from an organized network of neighborhood associations, in the entire Town. These associations would give residents a collective voice to advocate for their interests and concerns.

Strong neighborhood associations identify challenges and concerns among residents, to support change and improvement efforts, help resolve conflicts, provide volunteers for community initiatives, and represent the neighborhood as a whole to Town elected and appointed officials.

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Bryan Harvey: A quarter-century ago, historian Gary Wills identified a persistent conflict in American history, between a view of government as “a necessary evil” that should be “provincial, amateur, authentic, spontaneous, candid, … traditional, popular, organic, rights-oriented, … voluntary, participatory, and rotational” versus the idea that “government is sometimes a positive good, and … should be cosmopolitan, expert, authoritative, efficient, confidential, … progressive, elite, mechanical, duties-oriented, … and delegative.” “Group after group in our history,” he found, “treat[s] the first cluster of values as endangered by the second, under siege from them.”  

It explains a lot: the perverse conclusion that citizens who win elections are instantaneously converted into running-dogs of reactionary plutocracy; the conviction that the effort to find common ground is a betrayal of “the people,” and that the “governing elite” must be resisted. 

This conflict leads nowhere good. Can we overcome it? If not, do we even have a “community?”

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Jack Jemsek: Amherst as a community is as diverse and civic-minded as they come. Regarding diversity, Amherst ranks third out of the 43 municipalities in the Pioneer Valley, right behind Springfield and Holyoke (see Pioneer Valley Data) and there is little doubt Amherst ranks high for civic action related to race, LGBTQ+ and environmental issues. Look at the Town’s investment in establishing the CRESS department, and how Amherst has been on the forefront of municipal energy and climate policy.

However, what we are finding is that the many agendas of a liberal society can result in antagonism toward others.  At least that is what we’ve observed lately in Amherst with the meltdowns. If we as a Town step back, take a deep breath and be patient, perhaps we can refocus on treating each other with respect and follow rules of conduct while we achieve our mutual goals. We all want the same thing in the end.

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Bob Rakoff: When I taught classes on public policies, I usually started by asking students what they thought the “public good” or “public interest “ was. These are old concepts in political thought, but they have been sidelined in modern political discourse about interest groups and pluralism and class or racial and ethnic identity.

In a class on Obamacare, for example, we began by trying to identify the central goal of health care policy before unpacking the contentious and conflicting policy decisions to be made. And we kept referring back to the question of the public good in assessing the legislative details. Maybe something like that should be the starting point in local policy discussions.

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Allison McDonald, managing editor of The Amherst Current, did not participate because she was a member of the Regional School Committee during the middle school controversy and is quoted in the article in The New Yorker.