Left or right side of the aisle, we’d probably all agree that we’re in trouble the day Paris Hilton makes the most sense on energy, and that day just might have come.
Here’s Ms. Hilton’s opening volley in her 2008 presidential platform:
“OK so here’s my energy policy: Barack wants to focus on new technologies to reduce foreign oil dependency and McCain wants offshore drilling. Well why don’t we do a hybrid of both candidates ideas? They can do limited offshore drilling with strict environmental oversight while creating tax incentives to get Detroit making hybrid and electric cars. That way the offshore drill carries us until the new technologies kick in which will then create new jobs and energy independence.
Energy crisis solved!”
What Ms. Hilton gets is that critical Village Square concept, “the power of AND.” Solving our energy problem will require lots of “ANDs”. Of course, there are holes in her platform beyond that, but since she’s such a dark horse, we’ll let them slide.
If you actually look at either candidate’s energy platform, they DO contain many ANDs. It is, instead, the bizarre quality of our public debate that artificially eliminates the ANDs. So… I say, let’s all try to add them back in and, in our own tiny corner of the national debate, not be outdone by Paris Hilton.
This week it looks like we have our two presidential candidates, a Democrat and a Republican. So, it’s on. That makes this a perfect time to start work on a Village Square election manifesto of sorts. Just how do you participate in a spirited hard-fought race in a civil way? One that will leave America stronger than it found it? How do you fight like founding fathers? Here’s a first go at it…
Country first, party second. While it would seem to go without saying, apparently it doesn’t. We are living in a time when we must reach deep into our souls to remember that we are Americans first.
Allow facts to inform judgement, rather than judgement to cherry-pick fact. Know that the chickens of factual distortion almost always come home to roost eventually. May as well just man-up and accept what’s real right up front.
Give a hearing to both candidates. While it’s OK that your mind may be made up, your willingness to hear out each man will ultimately help us move on constructively no matter who the winner is.
Listen to whole speeches. There will be many speeches of substance in this campaign. There you will find a more cohesive picture of the breadth of the candidate than in sound bytes. Can you validly spend all that time whining if you didn’t hear all of what they had to say?
Know your source of information. Are you listening to opinion or fact, entertainment or information? There’s a big difference.
Lose the venom. Lose the venom-spewers as well, it’s a job that pays far too well these days. It wouldn’t if we didn’t listen.
“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy
present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must
rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew,
and act anew . . . Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history.”
From the Center for the Study of the Presidency comes an intelligent and inspirational work, Declaration on Civility and Inclusive Leadership, setting an appropriately high bar for our nation’s leadership. It’s high time we stop being primarily Republicans and Democrats and become (deep breath, this is radical) Americans. As David Abshire and Max Kampelman write:
Civility does not require citizens to give up cherished beliefs or “dilute”
their convictions. Rather, it requires respect, listening, and trust when
interacting with those who hold differing viewpoints. Indeed, civility
and inclusive leadership have often been exercised in the American
experience as a means of moving to higher, common ground and
developing more creative approaches to realize shared aspirations.
Bill Moyers commentary on the week of political goings-on with the Reverend Wright media blitz contained in it both a finger-wag at politics as usual (hard not to love that) and the daggone best quote I’ve ever heard. Moyers:
Politics often exposes us to the corroding acid of the politics of personal destruction, but I’ve never seen anything like this - this wrenching break between pastor and parishioner. Both men, no doubt, will carry the grief to their graves. All the rest of us should hang our heads in shame for letting it come to this in America, where the gluttony of the non-stop media grinder consumes us all and prevents an honest conversation on race. It is the price we’re paying for failing to heed the great historian Jacob Burkhardt who said: “Beware the terrible simplifiers.”
“… Lessons From the American Experience for the Coming Four Years.”
This essay written by David M. Abshire, president of the Center for the Study of the Presidency, is my new favorite reading. It’s fairly impossible to pull out a quote as the whole read is imminently quotable, but here’s a go at it:
Many Americans are inclined to look back on the founding generation and its Age of Passion with deserved reverence. But though they are revered today as miracle workers, their powers, as Madison reminds us, were the powers of men, not angels. their gifts were also plenty and diverse… As the greatest and most productive generation in our history, and perhaps in world history, we must learn from the examples of these men - their ability to hold ideals so strongly and to maintain their convictions while still listening to opposition and making allowances for human failings and compromise.
Dr. Thomas Cochran, along with Jerry Paul, will speak next Tuesday night at Dinner at the Square “The Nuclear Power Debate Version 2.0: What’s Old, What’s New, What’s Hype, What’s True.”
Here’s his advice to people in his field:
Always tell the truth. Always make understatements. And talk to your enemies.
They’ve each made major foreign policy speeches recently. You know, you’ve heard a sound byte or two. Which can’t possibly accurately convey the entire message of their vision for our future.
Our future. That’s your kids, your grandkids.
Got about 10 minutes? You can read each of their messages. Technology has, more or less, run us out of excuses.
DO IT.
Or explain to your grandkids why you didn’t bother. It’ll start something like “in 2008, I was busy with something or other and I didn’t have time to really pay attention…”
If you like The Village Square, you’ll love the new movie Purple State of Mind. The website is worth checking out and you can buy the DVD online as well.
Hat tip to Lea, who has her finger on the pulse of - well - everything.
In looking back on just where such an oddball affinity came from, I’m thinking it started with its colorful use as a prop by the late great He-Coon Florida governor Lawton Chiles. In his 1991 State of the State speech, Governor Chiles waved a three-legged stool in the air as an illustration of the American system of balance of powers between the executive, legislative and judicial branches. Saw a leg off, and that stool won’t sit right.
I’ve come to believe deeply, even reverently, in the balance of powers. The three legs of the stool of democracy achieves what is best in human history by acknowledging what is worst in human nature… that too much power tends to get the best of us pretty easily.
When I came back around to the religious faith of my childhood as an adult, good grief if I didn’t find another three-legged stool sitting right there in my Episcopal faith. The legs of this stool are Scripture, Tradition and Reason.
For a hoot, I googled “three-legged stool.” Apparently that little stool is a metaphor for balance in just about everything - Ronald Reagan’s conservative coalition, executive managerial theory, mind body & spirit - and on and on.
I recently found another sensible three-legged stool in Jim Wallis’ book The Great Awakening:
All three sectors of a society need to be functioning well for its health and well-being - the private (market) sector, the public sector, and the civil society (nongovernmental and nonprofit organizations, of which faith communities are a part). It is indeed like a three-legged stool. Each sector has crucial roles to play, and each should do what only it can do and not replace what the others can do better.
Private vs. public, business vs. government, church vs. state. The now dull and predictable political argument rages on, straining credibility that it never settles on the obvious conclusion that it’s “and” rather than “either/or”.
That lowly three-legged stool, it sits so close to the ground - so inconspicuously that you might just trip over it. But when you need to get something way up high, whether it’s a can of tomato soup or the makings of a fine democracy, it is so there for you.
