Can a community torn apart by politics unite to heal? In ‘Bucks County, USA,’ they try

As the nation hurtles toward a pivotal and divisive midterm election, it’s fair to wonder if people on opposite sides of the political spectrum will ever be able to again live peacefully as neighbors, to talk, and especially listen, to each other.

It’s a question co-directors Robert May and Barry Levinson and producer Jason Sosnoff set out to answer in the aftermath of the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. It led to their five-part docuseries, “Bucks County, USA,” now on streaming on PBS.org and the PBS app, that unfolds across four years in a suburban Pennsylvania county being ripped apart by vicious school board battles poisoned by partisan personal conflicts. (The finale streams Sunday, and the full docuseries will air Oct. 29 on SoCal PBS.)

“We don’t pay enough attention to one another,” Levinson says. “We just say, ‘I’ve formed my position and I’m locked into it’ and we don’t share enough interaction where we can discuss things. Democracy requires interactions, and if we cannot find a way to find common ground, that’s my big worry.”

The series shows how Paul Martino spent a fortune supporting Republican candidates who supported reopening schools quickly after the height of the pandemic but then, more contentiously, turned their attention to the culture wars. They focused on what was being taught in the classrooms and stocked on the shelves in the school libraries, leaving teachers feeling attacked and Black families and LGBTQ+ students alienated and ostracized.

“It’s unexpected how something like that can accelerate into such a contentious situation,” Levinson says, “where well-educated people in a wonderful community can’t figure things out.”

May says national polarization is poisoning the atmosphere locally. “It became a life-or-death battle in the name of their kids, but they both felt their children would be mercilessly mistreated if they didn’t do something to save them from the other side.”

The filmmakers followed the heated battles as people in the divided community resorted to screaming and name-calling. It frequently plays like a fun house nightmare version of “Our Town.” That’s true even of their version of the play’s Stage Manager. Two teenagers, Evi Casey and Vanessa Martino, Paul’s daughter, guide us through each episode. While the girls are best friends, Evi’s liberal mother and Vanessa’s conservative father view each other as hostile opposition.

“I think the series does a good job of showing the political division and how it affects the kids,” says Casey.

The series opens with a school choir singing “What a Wonderful World” underneath a collection of residents telling us how they’ve been berated: “I’ve been called a pedophile.” “I’ve been called a Nazi.” “I’ve been called anti-American.” “I’ve been called a dyke and a groomer.”

But the series then gets to know people in depth, allowing for far more nuance than the contentious school board meetings.

“My hope was that people can take the time to at least have a deeper conversation with somebody who they think is doing harm to their community and try and understand it better, “ Sosnoff adds. “It starts with microchanges where somebody reconsiders the way they might harm somebody else.”

Katherine “Kitty” Good Semisch, a retired Bucks County teacher and a key figure in the documentary, says the series is perfectly timed for the midterms because of its efforts to humanize everyone. “Dehumanization and demonization lead to the worst outcomes, and this kicks out from under anybody the lazy position that the people on the other side aren’t human,” she says. “Everyone is just trying to find something that works for their community.”

Sosnoff originally approached Levinson with the idea of a project that would humanize both sides, but his original idea was to bring people together at a summer camp with a facilitator so they could get to know each other better. “Barry wisely said, ‘That’s more of a sociological experiment where you’re playing God,’” Sosnoff recalls. “He said, ‘Let’s focus on a seemingly idyllic small town, like in “Our Town,” and examine what happened and why.’”

They chose Bucks County, a purple county in a purple state. “It’s not a place of extremists but people were really inflamed,” Sosnoff says, noting that some people were reluctant to speak on camera. “The climate of fear was very much alive. It was a community in trauma.”

There are brawls over policy that lead to lawsuits, but the main drama is the 2023 school board election, where the Democrats hoped to reverse the Republicans’ 6-3 majority.

While May says he is offended by “people that don’t care about other people or their right to exist,” especially when it comes to LGBTQ+ rights, he emphasized that he resisted taking sides in the documentary. “When we don’t see people as human, that’s when you lose a society.”

Indeed, Sosnoff says that while it’s bad when people are marginalized and victimized by discrimination from those in power, they’d still edit episodes to keep everything balanced, occasionally saying, “We need to give conservative characters more screen time and understand their positions.” (He also says they grew to like everyone involved.)

At the center of the drama depicted in “Bucks County, USA” is a school board election and a community grappling with political division.

(SenArt Films & Baltimore Pictures)

May says he knows some viewers will be furious with this approach, but he hopes that if they watch all five episodes, they’ll get a full picture. “You can’t just see parts of it. You need to see in order,” May says. “People reveal who they are over the five episodes. There’s an extraordinary amount of nuance, but if somebody’s saying something stupid, we have that too.”

(And don’t mistake May’s efforts at evenhandedness for a lack of passion — the day after a 30-minute joint interview with Levinson, he called me back and talked, largely uninterrupted, mostly about bias and perceptions.)

Amazingly, most people interviewed from both sides in the community support the final version.

At the center of the action are Vanessa’s mother, Aarati Martino, who ran for school board as a Republican, and Paul, who poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into school board elections.

“Overall, I am pleased,” Paul Martino says now. “There’s some things I think don’t portray the facts exactly quite right, but they recorded 500 hours and you’re not going to love everything that’s on the screen. Everybody is represented in this film.”

Martino, who never really owns the impact of him using his fortune to try to elect cultural conservatives, says he’s been “unfairly attacked” and has become “a convenient boogeyman in some of the scenes. But I’m actually not even upset about that piece of the puzzle.” (What he feels is lacking is that in 2021 he says 30% of the 300 candidates he funded around the state were Democrats.)

And Donte King, whose family endures racism both subtle and blatant, praises the filmmakers’ attempts to humanize people with contrasting viewpoints, saying he was pleased with getting to tell his story. “It allows people to connect with you,” he says. “We might have different ideologies, but we’re more alike than we are unalike, so maybe somebody who votes blue will identify with someone who votes red and vice versa.”

The closest thing to a hero in the series may be Semisch, a liberal, who shows civic courage in her efforts to build bridges, meeting one-on-one with Vonna DeArmond, a conservative elementary school teacher, and organizing events like an ice cream social and a candle-making evening. (Martino also posted an online peace offering, saying he’d buy anyone from the other side drinks; Semisch was the only one to take him up on it, but several people interviewed, including May, say Martino’s unbending personality may explain the lack of response.)

Semisch wishes that May had fact-checked some of the misleading claims by the right, but she praises the series’ subtlety. “I understand people’s frustration, but they’re leaving it to the audience to sort out who’s making sense,” she says. “My side was advocating for more books in the library and for better training for teachers to navigate difficult topics. As you watch, it seems to me that the people on the other side aren’t making as much sense.”

Near the end of the series, there’s one sweet moment of coming together between Evi’s and Vanessa’s mothers and another moment of seemingly genuine outreach by one of the town’s conservatives to King. But there’s also plenty of acrimony and recrimination in the aftermath of the school board election and one final confrontation between King and Paul Martino at a roundtable that leaves little doubt that tensions are still simmering.

Still, May says, “I remain hopeful and optimistic because I’ve seen the humanity in all of them. I think things are better there now than when we started.”

Semisch, with DeArmond, will lead discussions about the series in Bucks County and May hopes others will follow suit around the country. He and Levinson hope that by strengthening local communities, it can eventually lead to stronger national bonds. “Maybe people can learn from them. Maybe this series is literally the beginning of a change.”

Sosnoff is a bit more measured in his final assessment, quoting a participant as saying, “We haven’t buried the hatchet yet, but it’s been put away in the closet,” he says. “I’ll take that as progress.”

Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: latimes.com