When I started this hundred-person project, I thought I was conducting interviews.
Turns out I was conducting an experiment.
I had four questions, a microphone, and absolutely no idea what the hell I was going to find.
And naturally, I thought, If I’m going to understand what’s happening in my community, I need to talk to important people.
You know—leaders.
People with titles.
People with offices.
People who have assistants whose primary job appears to be making sure you never speak to the person they’re assisting.
So I went looking for leaders.
And then something unexpected happened.
I found citizens.
Regular people.
People walking their dogs.
People sitting in parks.
People at festivals.
Young people.
Older people.
People whose backgrounds were completely different from mine.
I’d walk up to somebody I’d never seen before and say:
“Hi. I’m interviewing people about America. Can I ask you four questions?”
And amazingly often they’d say:
“Sure.”
That’s it.
No appointment.
No résumé.
No membership card.
Nobody asked for my political affiliation.
Nobody asked whether I was important enough to talk to them.
They just talked.
And then something even stranger happened.
They kept talking.
The camera would stop…
and the conversation wouldn’t.
Five minutes became fifteen.
Fifteen became thirty.
Sometimes we’d laugh.
Sometimes things got serious.
Sometimes somebody would tell me something about their life that I never expected a complete stranger to tell me.
And I started realizing:
Maybe people aren’t suffering from a shortage of opinions.
Good Lord, we have plenty of those.
We’ve industrialized opinions.
America manufactures approximately nine billion opinions before breakfast.
Open Facebook.
Somebody you went to high school with in 1974 suddenly has a PhD in constitutional law, epidemiology, international relations and weather balloons.
Everybody’s talking.
But who’s listening?
That’s when the hundred-person project started changing for me.
I began this whole thing thinking:
I’ve got something to tell America.
About halfway through, I realized:
Maybe America has something to tell me.
So I shut up.
Best political strategy I’ve discovered yet.
Shut the hell up and listen.
And when I did, I heard disagreement.
Absolutely.
These hundred conversations aren’t a scientific poll, and I’m not going to pretend everybody thinks alike.
They don’t.
But underneath the disagreements, I kept hearing familiar human concerns.
People want to afford their lives.
They want their families safe.
They want opportunity.
They want dignity.
They want their children to have a future.
And maybe most importantly:
They want to know that somebody gives a damn what they think.
And here’s where it got interesting.
I also went looking for institutional voices.
I tried houses of worship.
I tried to speak with clergy.
Again and again, I couldn’t get the conversation.
There may be perfectly reasonable reasons for that—schedules, security, responsibilities, whatever.
But the contrast fascinated me.
I could walk up to a complete stranger on a sidewalk and get twenty minutes of their life…
while sometimes getting through the front door of an institution was harder than getting a human being on the telephone at an insurance company.
And that made me wonder:
Who exactly are America’s voices?
Maybe we’ve got the whole thing upside down.
Maybe the most important voices aren’t necessarily the people behind podiums.
Maybe they’re the people standing in front of them.
The nurse finishing a twelve-hour shift.
The twenty-two-year-old trying to figure out how she’ll ever afford a house.
The retired guy worried about his grandchildren.
The bartender.
The barber.
The teacher.
The person walking the Yorkie in the park.
The person at Pride.
The person sitting beside you at a coffee shop.
Nobody elected these people to speak for America.
They don’t have communications directors.
They don’t have talking points.
Half of them probably didn’t know what they were going to say until I asked the question.
That’s exactly what made it interesting.
Because somewhere along the way, I stopped looking for experts on America.
I started meeting Americans.
And that may be the biggest lesson of the whole project.
We spend enormous amounts of time listening upward.
What did the president say?
What did Congress say?
What did the governor say?
What did the mayor say?
What did CNN
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