must it take a life for hateful eyes to glisten once again?

This video mostly speaks to rifts in the YouTube atheist community, but there's a great list near the end of things that I think are worthwhile for mending broken fences in any community that's suffering.

The lessons learned that Jim, the speaker for Atheist Edge, presents:

1. Thicken our skins. Even insults aimed at us don't have to actually hurt us. Or, as Patrick Swayze put it in Roadhouse, when one of the bouncers asked, "Well, what if someone calls my momma a whore?", turn the question back on itself. "Is she?" was his answer. Face that down. Are we the horrible thing they called us? If we're not, let it go.
2. Identify trolls from people who are just emotionally attached to an idea. Watch the patterns. People who are emotionally committed, and potentially not thinking, may sound like trolls, but at some point, they will play their hand. We will see that whatever is on the table, is an issue they really identify with.
   Trolls don't. Trolls are just looking for a reaction. They're poking the bear to hear it roar. And they get immense satisfaction when the bear roars. Don't give it to them. Disengage, do not interact to the best of our abilities. We won't change the mind of a troll, because they aren't emotionally invested. They're just dropping insults to see what works and what doesn't.
3. This one I'm guilty of--don't unfriend the people against us and our opinions, don't block them, don't insult them behind their backs online. Things get heated, but if the only voices we're hearing are ones that 100% agree with our own, we are not growing and adapting to the world we live in. "If you create an echo chamber for yourself, it's even more harmful in the long run", he said, than maintaining contact with people who offend, enrage, or hurt us. (This is not easy advice to take, because we are consistently told that for self-care and emotional stability reasons, it's good, and sometimes vital, to cut off toxic people around us. I still believe that some people cannot, or are not willing to, change, and in those cases, maybe walking away is the only option we have. But to the best of our ability, try to keep the lines of communication open.)
4. To that end, reach out and extend an olive branch to the other side, if we can. Be open to hearing from them. (This is also hard, admittedly, because some people just mix like gasoline and flame. But we must try to do our best.)
5. No name-calling. This one I'm also guilty of; I try not to, because it is childish, and it makes me think I'm descending to their level, not elevating the discourse back to rationality. But try to keep this in mind. Look at how foolish Donald Trump sounds with his endless parade of nicknames for people he doesn't like. If a man holding the highest office in the land sounds like a fool when he bleats about "Lyin' Ted", "Crooked Hillary" and "Crazy Joe Biden", how am I going to sound by retorting with "Moron-in-Chief" or "President Cheeto"? None of these terms are purely accurate; most are designed to strike at someone on some level just for a reaction. (Can we say trollish behavior?) Can we at least stop slinging mud at each other and just communicate?
6. Try to find common ground. Some issues are by their nature polarizing, and right now, our current political and social climate makes it far too easy to other those who disagree with us. We are not talking to aliens born seventeen million light years away. We're talking to people who breathe the same air we do, cry the way we do, bleed red the way we do. Even if it has to come down to nothing more than that, even if there is no other common ground to meet upon, we always have at least that one salient point: we are speaking to other hominids who were born on this planet. And if we take the time to look deeper, we may find we have more in common than just air and iron.
7. One-sided conversations aren't good, either. We need to give our opponents time to respond, and we need to offer them the dignity of honestly hearing them out. If we truly don't understand their points, repeat them back to them, with an added "Am I understanding you correctly?" And sure, this may take a while, in person, on social media, in emails sent back and forth. Some things cannot be easily resolved, it will take time. Let it take that time.
8. Be aware of how we're speaking, how we're phrasing things to people, especially if we're speaking across the aisle on a divisive point. Personally, I know it's very difficult for me not to sound sarcastic, and it takes a tremendous effort--both in real life and online--to rein in the snark. Take a break, breathe, disengage for a while until we're not speaking from that place of pure emotion, and able again to speak from a place of logic and reason.
9. He brought up a concept called "steelmanning"--he defined it as, when we take another person's opinion that is diametrically opposed to ours, and explain it back to them in a way where they completely understand what we're saying. This is also diametrically opposed to a "straw man" argument, also known as an ad hominem attack, where we pick apart what we consider is a weak point in someone else's argument, and misrepresent what they said on that one point just to knock down that one point. When we prove to someone with a differing opinion that we understand that opinion, then and only then can we give constructive criticism on the particulars of that opinion.
10. Make a list of all of our currently held positions, on all issues--social, political, psychological, emotional, cultural--every opinion we have that we might be wrong about. Write it down. Refer back to it. Read it over now and again. Revise it when it needs revising. And keep this point in mind as well: if we cannot think of a single thing that we might be wrong about, then we have stagnated to the point of mental death, or at least thought ossification. If we cannot be budged on any issue we feel is important to our emotional well-being, then we are intractable and unwilling to change in any way. We'd be better served by picking lilies and laying down at that point, because we are no longer growing, thinking, evolving lifeforms.
11. Keep in mind, too, that the reason some of these people may be hostile towards us, is that we--or more likely, people who hold similar opinions to ours--are hostile to them. It's a basic self-defense mechanism. Get bit once, heal. Get bit twice, be grumpy about it, and heal. See someone who might be coming close to bite a third time--bite them first. It's a primal reaction, but we need to be better than that.
12. Realize that they may never have dealt with anyone, one on one, who holds dissimilar opinions. We have to be the ambassadors for our own communities, our own beliefs, our own ideals. And we must do our best to be the best version of ourselves when we realize we are in the ambassadorial position.
13. Lastly, understand that we don't have to be at each other's throats to disagree. We can hold fundamentally different opinions and still be able to communicate, as long as we are willing to communicate. Catholics and Protestants get along in Ireland, and they have a long and bloody history that, in many places, is still etched into the brick and stone of the walls around them. For the most part, Japan is one of our allies now, and they have every single reason (potentially NSFW images) to hate us forever.

None of these rules, guidelines, whatever, are easy things to do. Some are incredibly difficult to do, because we are not just thinking beings, but feeling ones. And ordinarily, there's nothing wrong with having emotions. The problem is when we get swamped by our emotions and cannot think clearly. The moment that happens, we are back in the cave, shaking clubs at the unknown dark. We have to hold on to our reason, to our calm, as much as we can, for as long as we can. Another thing Patrick Swayze said in Roadhouse: "Be nice." There may come a time when we can no longer be nice, but until that point, be nice. Be polite. Be cool. Never forget we are speaking to another human being, with feelings of their own. We need to keep thinking as clearly as we can if we ever hope to mend the breaches that divide us.

Because as long as we are standing on opposite sides of the fence, we can't accomplish anything. We have to at least be willing to meet on neutral ground, and talk things out. And sure, it won't work with everybody. But we will never know who it will work with if we never try in the first place.