Guest Comment, 2009

Guest Comment, published in the Daily Record October, 2009.

Since August I have been organizing a series of intentionally civil, non-partisan community discussions of important issues. Our third discussion of healthcare reform will be this Friday at 7:00 at the Hal Holmes Center. The speaker will be Jimmie Applegate, who is active in the local Republican Party. Mr. Applegate will be presenting his personal views on healthcare reform, followed by discussion. This series is co-sponsored by the Ellensburg Public Library.

I don’t know Mr. Applegate. My understanding is that his politics and mine are rather different. But we’re out of practice when it comes to listening to people with whom we may not agree, and that’s a problem. Sharing ideas with others makes our best ideas better, and saves us from spending too much time on our worst ones.
Someone said that the United States was designed by geniuses so that it could be run by idiots. I can’t find the source, but I’m guessing this quote is a recent one. The America of the Framers had only 3 million inhabitants. In that America, citizens communicated mostly by talking to one another, by writing letters, and by reading newspapers.
The US population is now 306 million. Between cable TV and the Internet, our face-to-face interactions are at an all-time low, e-mail and blogs are a significant form of “communication,” and newspapers everywhere are struggling. We can – and many of us do – spend all of our time listening only to ideas with which we agree.
Is it a coincidence that the Constitution stands as a model of cooperative statesmanship and compromise, while news analysis of the past couple of months has focused on our crisis of civility and the anger being acted out by some citizens?
I’m not a historian or political scientist, but it seems to me that there are at least two problems that have brought us to this state.
As readership of newspapers has declined, we’ve lost the common pool of information that helps us talk to our fellow citizens, even in casual chats. The situation is worse when it comes to talking with one another about significant events – local, regional, national, or international. If we don’t start out sharing at least a little understanding, it can be too much work – or take too much time – to get into a real discussion.

And we’re out of practice when it comes to having real discussions. By “real discussion” I mean a conversation where the participants don’t know each other well, where each person’s point of view is different, where everyone’s point of view is part of the conversation, and where everyone is honestly interesting in finding solutions. People having real discussions don’t necessarily agree, but they do respect each other.

I can’t do anything about declining readership of the local newspaper except encourage my friends to be subscribers. What I’m trying to do with the community discussion series is offer an
opportunity for us to listen to different points of view and to have real discussions in a reasonably safe environment.

Some people who have come to the first two discussions came hoping to see a public official. To be blunt, I don’t think we’re ready for that. Congressman Hastings isn’t on a committee that has addressed healthcare reform; both of our Senators are on relevant committees, but a Senator is a busy person. Maybe by practicing having real, civil discussions, we can attract one.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of important topics that we need to understand better as citizens. Global climate change and our state’s and country’s response to it is an obvious one. The war in Afghanistan is another. There are important local issues, too. Won’t you join us?