I’m not prone to say much about TV, but here’s something worth talking about that’s significant to Colorado and significant to the country: compassion in patriotism.

The question is right for this time of tragedy: What does it mean to be an American? It’s certainly more fitting than whether Joe Exotic was framed.

“Divided We Fall: Unity Without Tragedy” is a new documentary with a boatload of Colorado ties scheduled to make its world premiere April 30 at 7 p.m. on Rocky Mountain PBS. I got to take a look at it early. Colorado gets a look before American Public Television airs nationwide on May 20.

The documentary looks closely at two groups made up of 12 ordinary Americans from polarized political outposts trying to find their common humanity over 48 hours of conversation. 

Viewers listen in on meaningful discussions directly from everyday people – a musician, a construction worker, a bar manager and a brand agent, among them. They take on such weighty topics as whether we choose our truths.

You hear these powerful, challenging declarations.

“I’m always black first,” Khadijah Ameen, a 29-year-old analyst and project manager from Chicago said, by way of introduction. She’s her race before she’s her nationality, she said.

“The proudest moment was when Donald Trump got elected,” said Kimberlee Nolan, a 37-year-old hair stylist and single mother from Chicago, whose least proud moment was when Barack Obama was elected president by people she didn’t think understood politics.

For 42-year-old fraud analyst James Gaiero, he was proud “the day we killed Bin Laden. That’s what it felt like to be an American. Don’t mess with America.”

“It’s just been a steady, swift decline since then,” Jeff Avery, a 50-year-old chef on an oil tanker, said of 9/11.

“As horrible as that was, we all were in actual agreement for a couple of weeks.”

The documentary looks at whether we can find American unity without tragedy, at a time of tragedy when politics and media are so invested in division.

The documentary profiles the people behind their opinions, which allows you to hear the words in a kinder, gentler way, and when words get in, they enlighten. Words are the seeds of change. Tell me one time they weren’t.

Ameen talked about the day her brother was shot to death. She was a freshman in high school. “He called my mom and all she heard was, ‘Ma, I’ve been shot,’ and then the phone went dead.” The wound to her family has never healed.

In an epilogue, Nolan told the producers, “I learned more in 48 hours than I have in 38 years,” and added, “I opened up to people’s opinions and feelings.”

Boulder-based New Voice Strategies created the documentary, and my longtime brother and former Denver Post cohort Chris Frates flagged my attention to it. He’s helping promote it through his company, Storyline. Until a couple of years ago, Chris was a CNN correspondent. He hosts “Politics Inside Out with Chris Frates” on Sirius XM’s Politics of the U.S. channel.

“As a storyteller, watching real Americans struggle with the tough questions reminded me that the real power of conversation isn’t in changing minds, it’s in opening them,” Chris told me. “And ‘Divided We Fall’ is a crash course in how we can talk to each other with curiosity instead of animosity. It’s Mister Rogers for adults, reality television for social good. It’s a joy to watch.”

Of 32 advisers on the documentary, five are Coloradans:

• Kirsten Wilson from the Motus Theater in Boulder.
• Mardi Moore of Out Boulder on Longmont.
• Stephen Hawkins of More in Common in Denver.
• Philip Fernbach, a University of Colorado business school professor who wrote “Knowledge Illusion.”
• Pamela Paresky of the Aspen Center for Human Development in Aspen.

After the show, there will be a Zoom discussion moderated by Carolyn Lukensmeyer, the first executive director of the National Institute for Civil Discourse, which sponsored the project.

The piece works off the optimistic if not inspiring premise that Americans want to come together, indivisible.

The documentary was co-created by Tom Cosgrove, New Voice Strategies’ founder and president. 

He seemed pleasantly surprised that this collection of mismatched strangers clicked together just off the power of listening without prejudice, who saw each other as more than a single opinion once their personal political script ran out. One of the first exercises they did to loosen up folks was to have them sketch one another, to look at the person not the paper. “How often do we really look at people’s face, even people we’re intimate with?” he said. 

People want to be appreciated for who they are. More than love, power or money, people yearn deeply to be understood. If you could see the steps they took, you might better understand how they got there. Ignorance is our problem, not those we don’t understand.

By the time their 48 hours together was over, one group already had organized a reunion a few weeks out to associate some more. Seven of the 12 made it, and the others joined in via texts and FaceTime. Once you knock down the walls of judgment, friendship floods in. We could all use more friends right now, so it doesn’t seem so lonely.

That’s what it means to be an American.