At the booth, people choose a main package to dress their teddy bear. At the end, they receive a hand-written letter corresponding to the package that they choose. These letters are collected from the-other-color states, which means if a state is blue, then the letters included are mostly from the red.
In the letter, people write short stories of their lives, their difficulties, their dreams, etc. and anything that they want to tell the other side but couldn’t. The writer would have time to think more about what they write and the readers feel more willing to read the stories. People would understand more about others. They could decide to choose a type of package to deliver their message.
The team filters meaningful and polite letters to pair with packages in other areas.
What I expect from this is that people could read relatable stories and realize that people from “the other side” are also real humans with their own lives, dreams and aspiration. I also hope that this could create an “exit ramp” for both sides.
An example:
This is a story taken from an article in the reading list that could be paired with “rock package”
“In a city, you can plausibly aspire to start a band, or become an actor, or get a medical degree. You can actually have dreams. In a small town, there may be no venues for performing arts aside from country music bars and churches. There may only be two doctors in town — aspiring to that job means waiting for one of them to retire or die. You open the classifieds and all of the job listings will be for fast food or convenience stores. The “downtown” is just the corpses of mom and pop stores left shattered in Walmart’s blast crater, the “suburbs” are trailer parks. There are parts of these towns that look post-apocalyptic.I’m telling you, the hopelessness eats you alive”.
A message to the other side could be: “I hope that you could put yourself in our shoes to see why we voted for Trump as a small ray of hope. I hope that before criticizing us you have actually thought of solutions to help the country grow as a whole. For example, how to educate the “uneducated” people”.
