Keep the conversation going.

Hi, this is Joan from Town Talks Live in Indivisible, St. Louis. Last night, I attended a meeting that was a township meeting in a quaint little town, and a guest speaker came to speak, and I'm going to call him The Good Man.

The Good Man served five tours in war-torn areas. He re-enlisted after 9-11. The Good Man has given up his life and his livelihood over decades to serve this country and to protect democracy.

He has seen violence on the scale that few of us have, and hopefully we will never see. After he gave his introduction and a little bit of a speech, he took questions from the audience.

They started out okay, but one woman had outrage inside of her, and she shared that outrage in the questions that she was asking, and he didn't back down from those questions at all. He did try to answer them, and I think he did a good job.

But soon, someone else bounced off her outrage and attacked her, and then went on with his outrage, and then someone else stepped in with his outrage. And it was misplaced, in my opinion. I understand the outrage.

So let's ask why the outrage? People don't feel they are being heard. People are impatient with what is happening to our country and the disillusion of our democracy.

And people come to these meetings, and because we're not in a conversational type of mode, I feel like mob mentality clicks in, and people just lose their guard, and they enter into outrage.

It is my guess that any of these three people, if they were one-on-one in conversation with a good man, would not have used him as a whipping post. He's trying to make things better.

But it just reinforced to me the importance of Town Talks Live, and that we really need to change the town hall dynamic. We need to have conversations, and people who are representatives need to come and sit in those conversations, sit in that space with us.

So I really encourage you to go to the website, and if you are in South County on September 17th, and you're in District 95, join me when Meredith Sumenek, who is running for the State House of Representatives, is going to help me facilitate.

She's not coming to give a speech. She's coming to listen to her constituents, her potential constituents.

And then join me again on the 22nd, when Tori Schafer, if you're in the 99th Clayton, Olivette area, she's coming to hear you as well.

And finally, if you are in the 110 out here in Wildwood with me, come hear Claire. She's running for a state seat as well, and she's coming to listen to you, to hear your stories.

This is what we should be doing. And the good man, he's going to come to one of mine too. So let's get back to civil discourse, because our democracy is too important for us to consume each other with our rage.

Take care, and have a good day.