PURPLE: Allan Katz on the Greater Good, continued
John Marks interviewing Allan Katz, continued from yesterday…
On your campaign website, you write about yourself as someone who takes on the controversial issues. That means, presumably, you get right to the heart of the most contentious spirit in politics. How do you manage personally to keep your cool and build relationships across party and ideological lines?
Frankly sometimes I don’t keep my cool. And it’s hard to build and keep relationships across the divide. We feel strongly about issues usually not just for intellectual reasons, but for emotional ones as well, which makes it more difficult when people on the other side not only don’t accept your reasoning but they are indifferent to the emotional attachment you have to the issue and in many ways that is the hardest part to deal with. Sometimes you just have to work to not allow it to interfere with the other aspects of the relationship. The story I like to tell is the first time I met Barack Obama he said “Just because someone disagrees with you, it doesn’t mean they don’t have any good ideas.” While that sounds fairly simplistic, it’s important to remember. People who I’ve fought on opposite sides of local issues have remained my friends, not because I believe any more than I did in the beginning that they were right. I believed they were wrong and continued to be wrong and in some cases they chose to ignore the facts. However, that doesn’t affect my ability to be their friend or my ability to learn other things from them. And hopefully, they feel the same way about me.
You are one of the founding members of an organization called To The Village Square. That organization promotes dialogue across the divisions. It came about when a few members of both parties, Republican and Democrat, sat down as friends and started to talk about what they had in common. Right? How hard was it to get to that point, and do you see your act of community as a role model? If so, is that realistic?
It hasn’t really been difficult because we chose people to be involved that already had a shared relationship with each other. It’s important to note that a number of these people were part of a group that began sitting down before the Village Square was conceived of in an attempt to deal with some of the community issues, even though we came from diverse backgrounds. You have to be a role model in the community if you’re in a position of leadership and responsibility. In my opinion, it’s not enough to figure out which way the crowd in going and run to get in front of them. It is a question of trying to get with other people who are well-meaning and accept the axiom that if you don’t care who gets the credit, you get a lot more done.
We found a group of people in this community who want to do this and now we’re trying to take an idea into this community and hopefully some day into other communities that says there are ways we can communicate with each other where we talk about ideas and gain information and when we’re through, we may not believe one thing differently than when we started. But the process itself doesn’t just enrich us as individuals, but more importantly, we’ve enriched our community by creating a framework for people to be able to discuss things that are often very contentious. If you look at the old town hall meetings in communities in the northeast, all these people come and you’re allowed to not agree with some one and you’re even allowed to sometimes even get angry, although we try to discourage incivility. Even though we find it frustrating when we don’t agree with someone, it doesn’t mean that they are wrong, for one, or that they have nothing valuable to say.
What are the consequences of failure?
If we don’t fix this, we’ll continue to spiral downward in our ability to have meaningful political dialog in this country. It makes the zero sum game approach to policy issues that much more extreme. And when that happens in a society what you’re really doing is you are threatening an unraveling of the ability to peacefully resolve differences between us. And that is frightening. Generally what happens first is the rhetoric, so you need to attack it while it’s still rhetoric. And if we’re unwilling to do that, wherever it goes from here will not be good.
If you could give someone new to politics a word of advice about how to proceed with civility, what would it be?
It never hurts to be respectful to people with whom you disagree. I think it’s also much more credible if you’re willing to tell people things they don’t want to hear. I’ve had people come to me sort of say “Well what are you going to do for me?” And my answer is always the same: “Not a damn thing. Because it’s not about you, it’s not about me, and if you don’t understand that, we don’t have anything to talk about.” I think that the more of us in elected office who are willing to say that, the more chance that our communities will realize really something they already know. It doesn’t mean we agree on everything, it means we have common set of notions of what our community can look like, then we work together to get there.
Add comment June 2nd, 2009
