By RORY MOORE
Tiger Media Network
The American Democracy Project organized a dinner inside the Black and Gold Room of Memorial Union on Thursday where students and faculty were invited to learn how to respectfully discuss politics ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday. Its engagement came at the height of heated tensions surrounding the 2024 Election and the hostility towards opposing viewpoints.
The American Democracy Project hosted a Thanksgiving dinner where students and faculty were given deliberate dialogs to discussion pressing issues. 
Donnette Noble traced difficult discussions on differing realities, decreases in civility, and increases in polarization. 
Noble believes that approaching differing viewpoints in a volatile manner is unproductive and detrimental to the nation. 
The topic of discussion at the dinner was immigration, and students and faculty were given opportunities to share their viewpoints on the matter. 
Students and faculty debate each other on how to address the immigration crisis.
Leadership Program member and Director of Civic Learning and Engagement Donnette Noble attributes those tensions to the word-of-mouth fear of speaking out.
“People are really uncomfortable with discomforting content,” she said. “Conversations can be difficult but there are a lot of reasons why, and its different realities that are based on the sources of information that we have. We utilize the spheres of influence in our lives like our family, friends, social circles, and circumstances.”
Numerous research centers have conducted studies that show a sharp decline in civility in the United States.
“We are becoming less kind to one another, less respectful of one another, and less trusting of one another,” Noble said. “Media literacy is a huge factor that plays into people’s decreases in civility and interaction with others. We’re living in these spaces where we’re together, but we’re not really together. We need to be intentional in terms of finding ways to connect on human levels with other people.”
Noble pointed out that aggressive rhetoric combined with stress from the COVID-19 pandemic has also contributed to the decline of civility in people.
“We have a lot of polarization in our nation,” she said. “We’re becoming radicalized in our views for a variety of reasons, and people are stressed. We had a pandemic and a shutdown where people were isolated. We came back from that, and we’re still trying to figure things out after a pandemic. How do we work? How do we study? How are we protected? So, there’s a lot of stressors in people’s lives, and not everyone knows how to release that stress or get help with that stress.”
That stress leads to people responding in a combative nature that has been predominant in the American political climate.
“They find themselves in a situation where a conversation comes up, a topic is being explored, and they are becoming volatile and blow up,” Noble said. “That’s not productive. We can’t solve problems and find ways to strengthen our communities and our relationships if we’re not willing to sit and listen, and have healthy dialogue with one another and do it calmly and respectfully.”