There’s this, and then there is The Village Square…
Screaming constituents, protesters dragged out by the cops, congressmen fearful for their safety — welcome to the new town-hall-style meeting, the once-staid forum that is rapidly turning into a house of horrors for members of Congress.
On the eve of the August recess, members are reporting meetings that have gone terribly awry, marked by angry, sign-carrying mobs and disruptive behavior. In at least one case, a congressman has stopped holding town hall events because the situation has spiraled so far out of control.
“I had felt they would be pointless,” Rep. Tim Bishop (D-N.Y.) told POLITICO, referring to his recent decision to temporarily suspend the events in his Long Island district. “There is no point in meeting with my constituents and [to] listen to them and have them listen to you if what is basically an unruly mob prevents you from having an intelligent conversation.”
In Bishop’s case, his decision came on the heels of a June 22 event he held in Setauket, N.Y., in which protesters dominated the meeting by shouting criticisms at the congressman for his positions on energy policy, health care and the bailout of the auto industry.
Within an hour of the disruption, police were called in to escort the 59-year-old Democrat — who has held more than 100 town hall meetings since he was elected in 2002 — to his car safely.
“I have no problem with someone disagreeing with positions I hold,” Bishop said, noting that, for the time being, he was using other platforms to communicate with his constituents. “But I also believe no one is served if you can’t talk through differences.”
Bishop isn’t the only one confronted by boiling anger and rising incivility. At a health care town hall event in Syracuse, N.Y., earlier this month, police were called in to restore order, and at least one heckler was taken away by local police. Close to 100 sign-carrying protesters greeted Rep. Allen Boyd (D-Fla.) at a late June community college small-business development forum in Panama City, Fla. Last week, Danville, Va., anti-tax tea party activists claimed they were “refused an opportunity” to ask Rep. Thomas Perriello (D-Va.) a question at a town hall event and instructed by a plainclothes police officer to leave the property after they attempted to hold up protest signs.
We’re starting to research our next topic, health care reform, (Take 2 Aspirin, Fix Health Care and Call Me in the Morning) so why not read along with us? Here’s your homework for this week, a right-leaning and left-leaning publication two-fer:
As a part of my preparation for our last dinner A Rabbi, A Priest, A Pastor & An Imam I attended worship services with each of our speakers. Each visit was transformational in its own way. But it was my visit to a mosque that was most memorable.
Probably like most Americans, I had never been to a mosque and I had my own preconceived notions about what the experience would be like. As it probably should be, I was mostly wrong.
In getting ready, I expected to feel constrained by how I should dress. In part, I did (Florida in July screams bathing suit to me, not burqua). But beyond the overabundance of clothes, I give a thumbs-up to not having to put on make-up or jewelry. When I sat on the floor without shoes with Muslim women after the service (it felt very comfortable, like college girlfriends hanging), I learned that they see freedom in not needing to dress to please others, which can be a distraction from doing their daily work and serving God. (This is self-evident to any woman who’s worn stockings. I’m still convinced that stockings are a secret communist plot to overthrow capitalism, but then that’s a post for another day.) At the far edges of the dysfunction our culture owns, there are dangerous surgical procedures to tuck, stretch and saw off. At the very least I think it’s fair to say that women in our culture have some of our own constraints and I do believe the whole glass houses and stones thing.
The prototypical newsreel footage of Muslims at worship subconsciously hints at militarism, sort of a gentler version of North Korean soldiers on the march. In person it was nothing like that. The prayer was poetic, the movements in the prayer like a peaceful ballet that appealed to me in the same way as do the liturgical traditions of my own Episcopal Church. Taking a front row seat inside a mosque shows the texture of the individual humanity that the two-dimensional view from outside totally misses – the people moving in and out of the service, the babies crying, a random sneeze or cough… making it feel just like any church on any Sunday morning.
It’s pretty easy to characterize people before you’ve bothered to cross their threshold. And it’s pretty hard to hate them after you have. If I had one prescription for world peace after my visit to the mosque, it’s that you should go to a mosque or two (and Muslims to a church or two). What a tragedy it would be if peace could come so simply but we somehow never got around to it.
Stay tuned next Sunday for my visit to the mosque, part two. (Good stories have cliffhangers, eh?)
Soon we lay to rest Walter Cronkite, “the most trusted man in America.”
Its no use trying to separate Cronkite’s history from America’s history, him being right there with so many of us during the moments we’ve marked our lives by. His chorus of eulogizers is deserved and they are far more equipped than I to capture the measure of the man. In their remembrances there’s a melancholy that says we think Cronkite’s journalism has forever died with him. Surely he will not be at peace with that epitaph.
It is odd that Cronkite is still unmatched in our esteem, because since his heyday, we’ve experienced technology’s jaw-dropping explosion that beams images across the globe near instantaneously – surely a leg up for today’s press corps. We now have 24-hour cable news, which (if nothing else) provides journalists with many, many hours of practicing their trade. Yet in our estimation this man working with near stone-age tools, relatively speaking, beats our current crop of journalists hands-down.
Suppose that says far more about us than it does about Cronkite or journalists? More specifically, maybe it speaks to who we were as a society when we tuned into Walter Cronkite. And boy do we ever miss the old us.
Cronkite’s America found us sitting around one television set, watching one of two newscasts, distinguished from each other more by personal preference than by ideology. Things didn’t change as fast in the days we spent our evenings with Cronkite, so I suppose there really wasn’t as much to disagree about. But back then we still made lots of room in our lives for people who differed from us politically because they were our neighbors, they were in our bowling league or in our garden club. Heck, we even married them.
Today the bowling league is gone and we’ve got little tolerance for just how wrong we think other people are. Our every information wish is our command as we flit around the dial finding our tribe, and then settle into our favorite armchairs with our favorite beverage to sing an alleluia chorus, free from pesky facts that might soften our views. We have so much comfort in our lives; the discomfort inherent in the disagreement of good citizenship that keeps democracy’s marketplace of ideas alive is just so been-there-done-that. It is just so Walter Cronkite.
There’s always been fighting in democracy. But now when we do it, we fight as if we’ll never need each other.
Even as we step inevitably into smaller and smaller hermetically sealed echo chambers of complete agreement, at some intuitive level we know it was our better selves who showed up to sit down in the living room to watch Cronkite together.
Bill Bishop writes about this phenomenon in “The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart,” documenting demographic trends that have found us increasingly segregated by ideology since the mid-sixties. “As the nation grows more politically segregated,” writes Bishop, “the benefit that ought to come with having a variety of opinions is lost to the righteousness that is the special entitlement of homogeneous groups.”
And we are nothing if not self-righteous. A hundred years of social science research confirms that like-minded groups grow more extreme in the direction of the majority.
Witness where we are.
If we’re honest enough with ourselves to realize the mucky stall we’ve found ourselves in, the remedy is oddly simple, requiring only the mildest of human effort to reach out and remember how much we still have in common. While we’re at it, America is plunk in the middle of a world that really needs us to lead in the kind of civil citizenship that is wonderfully and uniquely in our very DNA as a country. One wonders what can be achieved without a single shot fired if we only steadfastly live up to our very own ideals, the kind of ideals that by their nature quietly shine a light into the darkest corners of the globe saying, “this is democracy…this is what free people can do together.”
We will miss Walter Cronkite badly, almost as much as we miss ourselves. But then who knows? Maybe the most fitting eulogy to Cronkite might be to simply remember who it is we were when we were last with him.
In his book Acts of Faith, Eboo Patel describes his belief that the challenge of our century is whether religious extremism will prevail or whether religious pluralism with hang in. He has a unique observation of how extremism works:
Religious totalitarians have the unique advantage of being able to oppose each other and work together at the same time. Osama bin Laden says that Christians are out to destroy Muslims. Pat Robertson says that Muslims want only to dominate Christians. Bin Laden points to Pat Robertson as evidence of his case. But if you look from a certain angle, you see that they are not on opposite sides at all. They are right next to each other, standing shoulder to shoulder, a most unlikely pair, two totalitarians working collectively against the dream of a common life together.
From the book Abraham by Bruce Feiler, describing his conversation with an American who came to Jerusalem after winning fourteen thousand dollars on Wheel of Fortune:
He decided to come to Israel for a year. Fifteen years later he hadn’t left. He tells a story to answer why.
Two brothers live on either side of a hill. One is wealthy and has no family; the other has a large family but limited wealth. The rich brother decides one night that he is blessed with goods and, taking a sack of grain from his silo, carries it to the silo of his brother. The other brother decides that he is blessed with many children, and since his brother should at least have wealth, he takes a sack of grain from his silo and carries it to that of his brother. Each night they go through this process, and every morning each brother is astounded that he has the same amount of grain as the day before. Finally one night they meet at the top of the hill and realize what’s been happening. They embrace and kiss each other.
And at that moment a heavenly voice declares, “This is the place where I can build my house on earth.”
“That story is shared by all three religions,” David said. “And our tradition says that this is that hill, long before the Temple, long before Abraham. And the point of the story is that this degree of brotherly love is necessary before God can be manifest in the world.”
…”This is not only the spot where it is possible to connect with God, it’s the spot where you can connect with God only if you understand what it means to connect with one another.
“The relationship between a person and another human being is what creates and allows for a relationship with God. If you’re not capable of living with each other and getting along with each other, then you’re not capable of having a relationship with God.” He gestured up at the Wall, the Dome, the churches.
Then he turned back to me. “So the question is not whether God can bring peace into the world. The question is: Can we?”
Photo shows President William Howard Taft riding in carriage with Woodrow Wilson, on the way to Wilson’s inauguration at the Capitol in Washington, D.C.
I know we’ve just elected a new president, and with the current state of the union it seems silly to even be thinking about this, but with the recent resignation of Sarah Palin, I started thinking about the 2012 election.
The 2012 election will be the 100th anniversary of the election of 1912, an election that some say changed America. This was the election that Theodore Roosevelt broke from the Republican Party (who nominated Taft) to start his Bull Moose Party and run for a third term. The Democrats nominated Woodrow Wilson instead of William Jennings Bryan who was the party’s candidate three times prior, and the Socialist Party ran Eugene Debs for the third time. Obviously as we all know Wilson was the victor, and helped, along with Roosevelt to usher in the modern presidency and continue the progressive reform of the early 20th century.
How fascinating this must have been at the time; but far-fetched 100 years later right? Current polls show Barack Obama’s initial popularity is wearing off, and if the economy doesn’t turn around pretty quick he might be looking at larger group of competitors for the nomination. I don’t think liberals are stupid enough to nominate someone over a sitting President, but our recent political history is full of surprises. Of course the Dennis Kucinich’s of the world wouldn’t have a chance but maybe an Al Gore, or even Hillary Clinton; perhaps Howard Dean will resurrect from the dead YEAARRRGGGHHH!!!
On the other side, the Republicans find themselves void of leadership. The candidate that emerges from the field in 2012 could say a lot about the future of the party, whether it is indeed becoming a regional party, or if it will regain its national dominance. Enter Sarah Palin. While her approval ratings aren’t high enough for a successful run right now, she does have that “It” factor. She is definitely well liked among conservatives and will not have as much trouble rallying the base as John McCain.
Maybe Ron Paul will mobilize a more formidable third party opposition with his popularity? Or perhaps someone like Joe Lieberman could mobilize from the middle?
Roosevelt, Taft, Debs, and Wilson meet Obama, Gore, Palin and Paul. What an election that would be. It’s the stuff that makes graduate students in political science squeal with joy. Of course it is a long shot. But 100 years ago nobody expected it either.
