(EL PASO COUNTY, Colo.) — The Colorado Springs Chamber and Economic Development Corporation (EDC) cut the ribbon Thursday evening, July 11, unveiling a community initiative to participate in Project Civility.
Project Civility originated in Carmel, Indiana, as a grassroots initiative centered around a belief that by cultivating civility in smaller communities across the country, it can expand to everyone.
Inspiring positive societal change can only happen if civil discourse takes place first. Once we practice and learn to project civility in conversation, positive change will reverberate from our local communities and extend to the entire nation.
“This has really become a topic of our time because we’ve seen so much, I guess I would say, uncivility, incivility and aggression, you know, within our culture,” said Jim Dutton, a pilot for one of the final NASA space shuttle missions and U.S. Air Force Academy (USAFA) alum. “So, how do we get back to the point where we can even have hard conversations together with people and still have mutual respect for one another?”
Dutton spoke at the event in Black Forest, where he shared how he was able to put that into practice with his seven-person crew during the STS-131 Discovery in 2010–a resupply mission to the International Space Station (ISS).
“I do believe we were a very successful crew in the sense of working well together,” Dutton said. “We were the last seven-astronaut crew on the space shuttle, so after our mission, there were four more. They were all smaller-sized. So we had more people. And yet, as we went through our training, the NASA trainers, we constantly got feedback that people were like, you know, ‘You guys seemed to really like each other.'”
He attributed some of that to the culture his commander had set, but also their built-in ‘shock absorbers’.
“We’re going to all have things happen where somebody rubs you wrong, but there was, I would say, a group of seven people that had a made a decision that we’re going to work together and be a team,” Dutton said. “It’s amazing what keeping a sense of humor does for deflating tense times and we certainly had some tense times, you know, in training. Times where things went wrong, we made mistakes, people made mistakes and we were learning from it but it was frustrating and you can take it out on each other or you can just own it and try and get better.”
He said this is something people can incorporate into their daily lives. It all starts with a mindset, and thinking the best about people before jumping to a conclusion, especially when someone wrongs you or cuts you off in traffic.
“Try to imagine the best possible thing for them rather than going down the road of like, ‘How rude, you know, that was.’ So, that’s a helpful mental technique too, right? Is look for the best in other people, assume the best,” Dutton said.
He added that kindness is contagious, but so is aggression, so stopping it in its tracks before it can spread can make the difference.
“We need people to just go, ‘I’m done with all the incivility in the world right now that we see happening in our culture. I’m going to help turn it around. I’m going to turn off social media and I’m going to go take a positive step to help make a difference,'” said Dutton.
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