Recently, I got an earful after writing a blog post that casually
compared opposition to proposed bike-friendly changes along St. Paul’s
Jefferson Avenue with the anti-government outrage on display at public
town hall meetings on health care.
My post provoked even more outrage from one resident who thought
I’d ridiculed him and his neighbors and dismissed their concerns.
There’s been a lot of that going around lately, and I was sorry
to add to the fire. I’d failed to follow one of my own principles:
Listen to understand the other guy — not to refute him.
But I had also failed to make this point clearly: When you
arrive at a meeting looking for a fight, you can’t expect to find a
solution.
Although not as publicized as the fights, we’ve seen some
examples in the past weeks of how airing our differences in public,
face-to-face, can begin to rebuild the trust so necessary in a
democratic system that relies on consent of the governed.
Last week, President Obama staged a town hall meeting on health
care in my conservative Colorado hometown, where the county gave him
only 34 percent of the vote in November.
U.S. Rep. Collin Peterson, D-7th, began a series of meetings in
his district, not long after he took flak for saying he didn’t care for
town halls because they were too often dominated by conspiracy
theorists.
Both leaders showed a willingness to engage their critics — and their critics responded in a civil fashion.
In other cases, we’ve seen apparent gamesmanship. Who’s doing the gaming, however, is open to interpretation.
U.S. Rep. Tim Walz, D-1st, reached out to the other side from
another angle. He invited neighboring U.S. Rep. John Kline, R-2nd, who
favors more controlled roundtables and telephone town halls, to join
him in co-hosting health care reform town halls in their respective
districts. Walz’s staff reached Kline’s staff with a call and an
emailed invitation Friday morning, but not Kline himself. When a press
release and copy of the invitation went out that afternoon before Kline
had responded, his office pronounced the offer a publicity stunt.
In Winona, state Sens. Sharon Erickson Ropes, DFL-Winona, and
Katie Sieben, DFL-Newport, announced a “High-speed Rail Summit” to
discuss building high-speed rail connecting Chicago and the Twin
Cities. The invitees included Democratic U.S. Sen. Al Franken, MnDOT
officials and local business leaders, but not the Southeast Minnesota
Rail Alliance, which includes the Mayo Clinic and other Rochester
interests that have been pushing for the city to be considered a stop
on a high-speed rail line.
Meanwhile, Gov. Pawlenty declined an invitation from DFL
legislative leaders to attend a “Minnesota Leadership Summit” that
would bring together a variety of expert perspectives to discuss how to
deal with the state’s budget woes.
“The state already has an annual ‘Minnesota Leadership Summit,’”
Pawlenty quipped. “It’s called the legislative session, and it lasts
approximately five months.”
Unfortunately, the governor was often a no-show during the session, too.
To be sure, town hall meetings and leadership summits are
designed with public relations in mind. The listening that occurs is
more about selling solutions than directly solving problems. But such
meetings also set the tone for general discourse and signal how leaders
intend to carry out their responsibilities on the public’s behalf.
The signals are decidedly mixed when some leaders say “Come, let
us reason together” and others declare “I don’t trust you, so I’m not
going to cooperate.”
Unfortunately, the best outcome we can expect from such a
polarized approach is likely to be something between forced compromise
and doing nothing. That’s just not good enough as we try to address
complex, systemic issues such as health care, climate change and a
healthy economy.
Maybe consensus problem-solving has become forever secondary to
partisan point-scoring, but I’m trying to be optimistic here. In that
spirit, I offer up some of the principles I try to follow in my own
imperfect discourse. Leaders and citizens alike are encouraged to steal
freely from this list:
1. Listen to understand instead of to refute. Try to grasp the
deeper interests and concerns behind people’s perceptions rather than
to label them or change their reality to match yours.
2. Ask about motivations, don’t ascribe them. Where facts are in
dispute, don’t assume others are being deliberately dishonest. Look at
the sources and discuss.
3. Speak to each other as individuals, from your own unique
experience, rather than striking a pose as your side’s champion. Talk
about perceptions, issues and solutions. Don’t become distracted by
politics and personalities.
4. Don’t take the bait when others go ballistic. Demonstrate the
values you believe are essential to the process, such as inclusiveness,
tolerance, mutual understanding and respect.
5. Seek a higher common denominator. If Minnesotans can’t find any common ground to start from, we’re really in trouble.
No matter what issue we’re wrangling over, we have choices about
how to act. We can bring together people with different perspectives to
weigh fact-based analysis and seek workable solutions. Or we can pursue
policy by placard, in which case, I’m right and you are, at the very
least, a dishonest idiot.
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