Cafe offers rarity for America after Jan. 6 riot, division: Civility
LOVETTSVILLE, Va. — When Maureen Donnelly Morris came from nearby Leesburg to open her cafe in Lovettsville, she got a warm welcome. Neighbors rallied to her aid. Divisions ripping at their town and their country were set aside. America’s thunderous rage felt distant.
They sank posts for her parking signs. They brought solar lights for the cheery space outdoors, sharpened her bagel-slicing blades and contributed plants, all to herald what would become the town’s social hub and civil common ground, Back Street Brews.
Forget, at least for one split second, red, blue, left, right, pro-Trump, anti-Trump. No one asked the woman from Leesburg: Which side are you on? And she wouldn’t have said, if they did. She still won’t.
In this community of some 2,200, and others like it across the United States, neighborly ways and social ties persist, even in a country that seems to be at war with itself. It’s a quieter force than all the yelling that is driving Americans apart. But the redemption of a nation and future of its democracy may depend on it as the anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol approaches.
At least among neighbors in the cafe, says Moe, as everyone calls her, “You’re allowed to be a Republican, and I don’t hate your guts. And you’re allowed to be a Democrat, and hopefully you like me if I’m not.”
In a terribly fractious America, that sentiment can no longer be taken for granted.
A year after the violent assault on the Capitol by supporters of a defeated president, Donald Trump, the United States is split in nearly every conceivable way. Shared sacrifice seems to be an artifact. Against the coronavirus pandemic and other problems, we’re conspicuously not “all in this together,” as the pandemic cliché claims. There’s no common set of facts.
Still menaced and now exhausted by COVID-19, Americans can’t agree it’s better to be vaccinated. Elected officials, even the No. 2 Republican in the House, refuse to say the duly proper, legal and fair election of President Joe Biden was not stolen from Trump. To be clear, it was not.
Deeply complicated questions about race, parental rights, schooling and the teaching of history gave rise to fiery, simplistic slogans and a sense among voters in Virginia and elsewhere in November’s elections Democrats are out of touch. Virginians put the brakes on their drift from red to blue, electing a Republican governor for the first time in a decade.
The public is deeply split over whether to believe an unassailable fact — that Democrat Biden was honestly elected. In the Jan. 6 aftermath, about two-thirds of Republicans agreed with the idea Biden’s election was illegitimate and, by the fall, their interest in seeing the insurrectionists prosecuted had declined.
That’s the warring America. It plays out in Washington, in decidedly uncivil town meetings across the country and over the airwaves. It infects social media, where people, by their own admission, lose their minds.
There’s another, quieter, America, too. It asks about the family. It commiserates about the water bill and shoots the breeze. It’s a place where people who can be Facebook-nasty are face-to-face polite. Often it meets over coffee.
There’s no question Trump drove people further into their political corners and made things louder, coarser and more chaotic. And the one-two punch of political distancing and social distancing has taken a toll.
Trump and the pandemic “pretty much ripped a hole through the center of town,” says Kris Consaul, a left-leaning activist and a former town planning commissioner in Lovettsville.
Into the breach came Back Street Brews, which set up in a building shared with a craft shop in late 2017, then expanded in 2021 to fill the space after pandemic-plagued months of serving people only out a window. The town got its first place to hang out, sit with a laptop or strum a guitar.
Worship groups, a new-mom gathering and various other coffee klatches have taken root. Political discussions pop up, though rarely a heated argument. And when you sneeze in one cubbyhole, a stranger in another calls out, “Bless you.”
“It’s not really a pot-stirrer kind of place,” said Moe, who turns a brilliant smile on everyone who walks in. “I just don’t invite it. And if it comes up, you know, as long as it’s respectful, you can talk about whatever your beliefs are. I don’t care. If you are a staunch this or staunch that, I always say, keep that out of here.”
Erik Necciai, a consultant to federal agencies, brought his family to the Lovettsville outskirts just more than 10 years ago. In the early 2000s, he worked as a Senate aide to Democrat John Kerry of Massachusetts and Republican Olympia Snowe of Maine on the Small Business Committee. He knows about quaint bipartisanship. He’s also handy with a shovel.
So when another neighbor made wooden posts for Back Street’s tight parking, Necciai bought the concrete, dug the holes and poured the footings.
“We all have different political views,” he says, describing his own only as moderate. “It’s very hard to have conversations nowadays in public spaces. But I sat here in this coffee shop not long ago ... and some topic came up, and then all of a sudden, we were solving five or six different political problems. Russia, what do we do about that? China?
“Everybody’s opinion was greatly accepted. And I think we need a little bit more of that. We live in a world now where we are learning better to not judge people on their exterior. Yet, if somebody were to come with a particular hat — a red hat ... we instantly judge them. When we don’t necessarily know them.”