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On Monday night, as part of the very important Welcoming Week here in Austin, The Minnesota Humanities Center and Danger Boat Productions presented Sketches of Minnesota Austin.

It was a night of improvisation comedy setting the stage for discussions of the community both now and for what it might look like in the future.

At the end of the night, people were laughing as reflections of their community played out before them, but the central point of the night wasn’t necessarily to make people laugh or make fun of Austin, but rather to get people thinking about those things that mean the most to them.

It was also a bridge of discussion to bring differing view points together in a medium of entertainment that promoted positive thinking rather than adversarial thinking.

This was a night to celebrate differing view points and was pointedly different from what we are often seeing in modern media and online through social media websites, where one sentence arguments act as defining points with no substance.

This is an example we can carry forward that while differences will persist, there should be no point where they can’t be talked about it in a rational way.

Dialog should be promoted as a way to reach a desired and mutual understanding of a problem before us. It should not be an all out war of reason that deteriorates into rhetoric that once freed into the public can be difficult to walk back.

It was a fun night of ideas and that’s what our future should be defined by.