I’d heard about the Aspen Institute’s new effort to go beyond ordinary politics in our fractious America and focus instead on what we have in common.

Because, otherwise, it’s pretty bad out there. When we just parrot the — admit it — propaganda of our own tribe, we’re not going to get anywhere. Before I get to the really good stuff that Weave: The Social Fabric Project is doing, I will go to a family version of the really divisive stuff we all are living.

A cousin of mine, who I have known since we were born, which was a very long time ago, is a rancher in the Texas Panhandle, as many of my cousins are. I see him every summer. He is a super guy, a loving husband, father and grandfather. A volunteer firefighter against the vast blazes that sweep the prairies. Drives his rodeo star grandkids around the West. Cooks me what are euphemistically termed calf fries in vats of boiling oil every August at our family reunion in the Palo Duro Canyon, and I claim to like them, because I love my cousin. He is a Trump voter. I am not. We find other things to talk about, because neither of us is going to convince the other about that one thing.

This is the way Weave is looking at the world. “In today’s polarized climate, many see the deep divisions in our society as insurmountable,” writes Aspen’s Paul Smalera. “Yet some Americans believe there is a solution — and that the path to a more united America starts at the local level. Through quiet acts of care and cooperation, they are weaving fresh connection every day in their communities across the country.”

A core feature of some Americans who are going beyond their nominal differences, he says, is that “they don’t focus on resolving arguments — they find areas of mutual interest and concern, bonding an often-unlikely group to a common cause.”

The nascent group is aiming at the micro, not the macro, level. A weaver, its organizers say, believes in novelist E.M. Forster’s old English countryside motto: “Only connect.” They are asking us to step into the little picture and make “a positive difference through consistent acts of neighborliness, support and relationship-building.”

They see weaving as “a subversion of norms, a countercultural way of showing up that views all community members as equal partners in creating a place where everyone wants to live.”

This is pretty optimistic stuff in our pretty pessimistic time. And I for one would say that no one in their right mind should imagine that it means one should lose focus on necessary outrage over policy disasters at the Supreme Court, or in the White House, Sacramento, City Hall.

But day to day we live in our neighborhoods, not in D.C. One Weaver, Arica Gonzalez, bought a home in Baltimore, one of 50 row houses sharing an alley.

“No one used it except rats, drug dealers and drug users,” the Aspen folks say. “Gonzalez didn’t focus on the alley as a problem to be solved — as a blight. She focused on what it could be. Something beautiful and welcoming rather than dirty and scary. A community green space where their kids could play, people could sit and read, and families and friends could picnic.” She and her neighbors convinced the city “to allow them to put gates on the alley and give them the right to develop it.” It is that green space now.

Check out your own neighborhood’s possibilities by going to Weave’s interactive national Social Trust Map and putting in your ZIP code. I did it with mine. On the 100 scale, our “Intentions” are an excellent 99. Our “Behaviors”? A rather more lackluster 55.

I think we could weave some better community cloth, if we tried.

Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.