“A lot of people think that time moves in a straight line, but that is not quite right,” Glenda Holste said.

Holste is a retired journalist who began her career during volatile times in history and now works to mentor the new generations. She shared with me that the 1960s — when she began her journalistic career — was a volatile time for the U.S. In fact, she said she was in Memphis when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.

Over the last 55 years, Holste said while a lot has changed, some things remain the same and other things have come back around.

We discussed the recent Wall Street Journal and NORC poll, and what it shows about how traditional American values are changing.

The poll showed several key values’ importance to Americans has declined in recent years, including patriotism, religion and having children.

Holste said one of the key American values is self-determination, or the ability to determine one’s outcome in life. She noted this was truly the most important value to most Americans.

The poll uses the term “self-fulfillment,” which has subtle differences in meaning and could refer to a concept more similar to happiness. The poll showed that 91% of Americans find this value important.

There is also some irony in the poll, as 90% of Americans hold that being tolerant of others is important. Current times, however, feel divided, and one does not have to look far to see people being intolerant of one another’s immutable characteristics, let alone choices or opinions.

So, how can this be that Americans can value something so highly, and yet don’t appear to practice the value often?

Perhaps the issue is that we are asking the question the wrong way. Traditional American values could be considered the outward expression of the actual underlying values that are more abstract but more universal.

For instance, patriotism does not need to be a partisan political issue, but it is in some ways being made into one by focusing too narrowly on the ways in which it is expressed.

Patriotism does not always look like flag waving and fireworks. It can also look like volunteering to scrub gravestones to preserve the dignity of the dead. It can look like preserving historical documents and stories so that future generations can continue to learn from the past. It can look like advocating for political change as we as a society learn more and come up with new ideas about how the world and society should work.

What stays consistent in patriotism, when you strip down all of the external expressions of it, is the belief that your country is something you can respect and believe in, that it can and will get better with the proper care and that it is worth fighting for.

Holste and I discussed this idea at length, that Americans may indeed share more values than they think they do. They just disagree, sometimes strongly, about how to express those values.

She put it in historical context and described how, over time, history moves in lulls and “pushes.” She said the 1960s was a decade of “pushing” in several ways, from the Civil Rights movement to the Vietnam War and the sexual revolution, among many other movements occurring simultaneously.

She said current events are similar in some ways, where society does not attack one problem at a time, but rather “pushes” to reevaluate many things at once.

These “pushes” are indeed important for establishing or re-establishing a way of life for a society. Not every single issue in society can be solved during these periods, but one can hope that the best ideas can win out if discourse proves effective and common goals are acknowledged and served by the changes. Many positives came out of the tumultuous and painful times of the 1960s, but by no means was every problem solved or scar healed.

Holste said time seems to move faster during these periods, and then it slows down again in the lull that follows, as society settles into a new status quo and we wait for problems or societal shortcomings to bubble to the surface once more. She also said technology, and particularly that which allows people to communicate faster over large distances, contributes to this cycle speeding up, leading to shorter lulls between “pushes.”

Holste also said the breakdown in civil communication in American society concerns her. She said while communication is faster and reaches more people, it seems there is less ability to remain civil with others when discussing their opinions, leading her to fear society’s ability to problem solve.

When asked what the most critical American value is to preserve, for the sake of the continuation of this country, Holste named tolerance.

If we do not have tolerance for others and their points of view, she said, then we would not have much to talk about.