Today’s column is about a topic appropriate for the day: hope.

It’s a column about why, despite the acrimony that dominates public discussion today, you might find reasons for optimism in a recent discussion we hosted in our podcast, Today in Ohio.

Normally, the podcast is a discussion about the day’s top stories, but the goal of our recent conversation was to determine whether even-tempered people on both sides of the political spectrum could find areas of agreement on hot-button issues.

Our theory was that small groups of people on the fringes of the political spectrum have come to dominate public discourse. We wondered what would happen if we focused on people hewing closer to the center, on both sides of the line.

I used my From the Editor Subtext account to find volunteers. I send a text each day to just under 900 people who subscribe to the texts, to describe stories we are working on and questions we seek to answer in our newsroom The subscribers are engaged, as I usually get 20 to 60 messages back each day, to help us, or caution us, or offer some helpful context. It’s a great group of people, so I thought we’d get some good volunteers. You can subscribe for free at https://joinsubtext.com/chrisquinn

Here are the people who participated in the experiment:

Sheila Wright is a developer, entrepreneur and soon-to-be columnist on our platforms. She is the former head of the Cleveland chapter of the NAACP.

Jane Corteville is a doctor certified in obstetrics and gynecology as well as clinical genetics. She is the director of obstetric imaging at University Hospitals who says she is nearing retirement.

Dean DePiero is the former mayor of Parma who served five years in the Ohio House as minority leader. He works today in public law, representing municipalities and private clients interacting with public bodies. He is the law director and prosecutor in several communities.

Alex Messina is an attorney in his fourth year of practice, specializing in tax, securities and antitrust litigation. He earned his law degree at Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, where he was president of Cleveland State’s chapter of the Federalist Society, a group of conservatives and libertarians interested in legal order.

Bob Paulson considers himself a right leaning moderate who served for ten years as the mayor of Solon. He regularly corresponds with me about news of the day, offering helpful insights.

Sheila, Jane and Dean would be on the left side of the line, with Alex and Bob on the right.

I put together a list of topics to discuss, figuring that we would not get to all of them. In 45 minutes, we got through three, gun laws, the pandemic and restoring faith in elections.

I thought that the five would find some areas of compromise. They are reasonable people after all. But I thought they’d come to an impasse on some others. I was surprised, then, when they agreed on just about everything.

If we had continued and talked about policing and education, we might have hit some hurdles, but if you listen to the conversation, what you’ll hear are thoughtful people having informed discussions. In my earlier years on this planet, people had conversations like these all the time. We were not so polarized that we could not talk to each other without getting angry. Today, a lot of people fear bringing up topics like this with people they don’t know well, to avoid the angry confrontations.

It can be done, though, as these five brave souls proved.

At the end of the discussion, Jane summed it up best, by saying she had more hope.

You can listen to the special episode at https://tinyurl.com/civildiscussion

Now, how do we take what happened with these five and spread it across the community?

Thanks for reading.