Archive for June, 2009
I’ve struggled in the past week processing the events in the death of Kansas abortion doctor George Tiller. In every current event, my job is to stretch to find middle ground, but this one is quite the minefield. There’s even a language “eeny-meeny” minefield. Call him “an abortionist,” I’ve offended. Call him a “doctor…” I’ve offended the other “side.”
Frank Schaeffer, former member (current critic) of the religious right, writes:
But the reason this issue will never go away is that the Roe ruling was an over broad court decision that makes abortion legal even in the last weeks of pregnancy. Take away the pictures of all those dead late term fetuses and everything changes emotionally. Democracy and civil debate is messy but if abortion had been argued state-by-state abortion would be legal in almost all our states today and probably the laws would be written more like those of Europe, where late-term abortions (of the kind Dr. Tiller specialized in performing) are illegal and/or highly discouraged.
Angry speech has become the norm in American religion from both the right and the left. Words are spoken which — when taken seriously — lead directly to violence by the unhinged and/or the truly committed.
When evangelicals on the right call President Obama a socialist, a racist, anti-American, an abortionist, not a real American, and, echoing the former Vice President, someone who is weakening America’s defenses and making us less safe, the logical conclusion is violence. If you take these words literally you might pull the trigger to “make America safe” and/or free us from communism or to even protect us from — what some “Christian” leaders claim — Obama as the Antichrist.
I wonder how many of us can agree on two points:
1. Late-term abortions should not be performed simply because the pregnancy isn’t wanted.
2. Our angry language has real consequences, even if it’s only to inflame someone who is probably mentally ill.
June 8th, 2009
On this day sixty-five years ago, young Americans were fighting and dying on the shores of Normandy France. The soldiers made their way onto the beach that June 6th in Higgins boats, unique high-walled boats that carried 25 men, sort of a “floating boxcar.”
Conservative author Peggy Noonan wrote about D-Day, and about the Higgins boats in the introduction of her book “Patriotic Grace: What it is and why we need it now.” Noonan tells of one soldier, his fate intricately woven with the fate of the other men in his Higgins Boat, heading in high seas to a conclusion unknown… “it took [his] five little boats four hours to cover the nine miles to the beach:”
They were the worst hours of our lives. It was pitch black, cold, and the rain was coming down in sheets, drenching us. The boats were being tossed in the waves, making all of us violently sick.
Noonan reflects in the remainder of Patriotic Grace on the difficult circumstances we find ourselves in as a people today, and of the rise of the partisan hate-filled din. Says Noonan “we fight as if we’ll never need each other,” yet our very fate may depend on one another.
And so I came to think this: What we need most right now, at this moment, is a kind of patriotic grace-a grace that takes the long view, apprehends the moment we’re in, comes up with ways of dealing with it, and eschews the politically cheap and manipulative. That admits affection and respect. That encourages them. That acknowledges that the small things that divide us are not worthy of the moment; that agrees that the things that can be done to ease the stresses we feel as a nation should be encouraged, while those that encourage our cohesion as a nation should be supported. I’ve come to think that this really is our Normandy Beach… the little, key area in which we have to prevail if the whole enterprise is to succeed. The challenge we must rise to… We are an armada. All sorts of Americans, wonderful people, all ages, faiths and colors, with different skills, fabulous skills, from a million different places, but all here with you, going forward.
Like it or not, we are in each others’ Higgins boats. Our fate, almost certainly shared.
Given that circumstance, perhaps we might use today to consider how we will best keep faith with those young Americans who left their lives that day on Omaha Beach.
Photo credit: Chuck Holon
June 6th, 2009
Guess the speaker… again, it is someone that roughly half the population really dislikes.
Don’t divide the world into “them” and “us.” Avoid infatuation with or resentment of the press, the Congress, rivals, or opponents. Accept them as facts. They have their jobs and you have yours.
June 5th, 2009
As President Obama ends his Middle East visit, the partisan cherry-pickers are out in full-force picking the “cherries” from his speech that support their pre-existing bias (for or against), ignoring the full meaning of his words. I suspect it won’t be long until they start pelting each other with the cherry pits (and get ratings while we watch the fracas).
A speech that lasted almost an hour cannot be understood in a sentence or a paragraph.
As Obama says in his speech “…I am convinced that to make progress, we must say openly to each other the things we hold in our hearts and that too often are said only behind closed doors. There must be a sustained effort to listen to each other, to learn from each other, to respect one another and to seek common ground.”
So swing those doors wide open. A discussion between liberal and conservative Americans about what the President has just said must be had, but the discussion must be grounded in an awareness of the whole speech.
It simply cannot be done in a way that honors the ideals of America by picking cherries.
June 4th, 2009
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.
June 2nd, 2009
Journalist, novelist, former 60 Minutes Producer and U.S. and Purple State of Mind-er John Marks interviews Tallahassee’s very own Allan Katz for his new series: PURPLE: The Interview.
Welcome to Purple, the first in a series of Sunday interviews-slash-conversations that will become a regular feature on this website. The conversations will cover the gamut of subjects, but we will always circle back to the question of cultural, social and political division in this country and the world.
There are no simple answers, of course, but in our attempt to wrestle with the national wrestling match, we’ll feature thinkers, artists, musicians, politicians, pastors, journalists, judges, historians, novelists, scientists and playwrights, to name just a few.
For our first chat, we’re turning to the basics of civil society, a conversation with a veteran of American politics at the national, state and municipal level, and one of our sponsors on a recent visit to Florida.Commissioner Allan Katz is currently serving his eighth year as a Tallahassee City Commissioner. Allan formerly served on the staffs of Florida Congressman Bill Gunter and current Wisconsin Congressman David Obey. He is a former member of the Democratic National Committee and was one of President Barack Obama’s earliest and most active supporters in Florida.
In 2005, Allan was the lone City Commissioner to oppose City of Tallahassee buy-in to a proposed pulverized coal plant. Allan lead the opposition in a ballot initiative to approve the plant, calling the option to own part of the plant “like investing in the last buggy whip factory.” Ultimately, new events proved Allan’s opposition prophetic and the plant was not built. Allan recently found himself disagreeing with some of the very people he worked with opposing the plant in his support of a proposed Biomass plant.
He later joined with some of his most prominent opponents in the coal fight to form the nonpartisan public forum “The Village Square,” dedicated to civil discourse and fact-based decision-making across the partisan divide (http://www.tothevillagesquare.org). For “visionary leadership” on environmental issues, this April Allan was the first recipient of the “Champion for Climate Change Award” given by the Environmental Defense Fund and the Florida Wildlife Federation. He is a partner with Akerman Senterfit, one of Florida’s largest law firms.
Commissioner Katz was kind enough to take time out of his busy schedule to respond to our emailed questions.
Commissioner Katz, you’ve been in public service at the national, state and local level for decades. Can you remember a time when political opponents behaved toward each other with mutual respect? Or is that just one of those Golden Age dreams that never really happened?
I think that there was a time when there was a different type of dialog. There was always a shrill aspect out there but it was a less dominant sound, it was much more on the fringes and as a result there was a respectful dialog in the middle that basically tested the different ideas about the appropriate role of government was. Should we either be protected by government or left alone by government? I think those days have changed and our debate has evolved into something much more damaging. For example – if you are concerned that prayer in the public schools is a problem because of children feeling excluded or coerced, then you are attacked for being anti-religion. At the same time, people who believe that prayer in the public schools is appropriate are being branded as religious zealots. Unfortunately that has become far too much of the common lexicon among far too many of the people in our society.
How much civility do you see in Tallahassee politics now?
In our local politics, we have a fair amount of civility. As far as state politics goes – which takes place in Tallahassee – I think we have a remarkable lack of civility. Again, that varies with different leaders at different times. In Tallahassee, we have a pretty normal bell curve… On the extreme left and extreme right you have people who are demonizing everyone who doesn’t agree with them. But for the most part I think people have a relatively common set of values. And while I’m not particularly enamored of the way some people describe people who are on opposites sides of an issue from them – from time to time – but I think generally speaking, it’s relatively civil. It could be improved and hopefully what we’re doing with The Village Square will help us get there.
These days, our national dialogue on a wide range of difficult issues seems to get worse by the day. Partisanship has turned vicious. I know there are many roots to such a complicated and deep-seated problem, but in your mind, are there one or two factors that have been most influential in poisoning the atmosphere?
At the national level, in some ways, it is getting better. I give a lot of the credit to the new president, who has done several things that I think are interesting. First of all, he’s been willing to tell people things they don’t want to hear, which I think is always a good thing. Also, he’s been willing to deal with a number of volatile issues in a dispassionate way in an attempt to work with what you have to solve the problem. His speech at Notre Dame was a good example of this. He, on the one hand, chastised everyone for demonizing people who disagreed with them and at the same time recognized the obvious point that this is an issue on which some people will never agree. And that’s something we really haven’t had anyone the stature of the President do in a really long time.
Abortion is one of the top three most significant issues that have created this inability to listen to each other. People who are pro-choice think that people who are opposed to abortion are abortion nuts. And people on the other side think pro-choice people are pro-abortion. And no one I know is pro abortion, it’s a question of how we deal with the issue. As someone who considers himself pro-choice, I’m sympathetic with people who think abortion is murder. There is a significant diversity of opinion on abortion within our society so the issue isn’t really how we’re going to convince each other, it’s how we’re going to live with each other.
Another issue that has clearly helped create some of the nastiness is the issue of gay rights. While it has been used to inflame people ][to oppose gay rights] in a negative way, ironically, as you look around the country, clearly that paradigm is shifting and its almost done the opposite, particularly with younger Americans (who many believe have a sense of entitlement which is not particularly attractive). On the positive side they seem to be color-blind and, to them, a difference of sexual orientation is insignificant.
Continued tomorrow…
June 1st, 2009
Next Posts
