Town Hall Blues
by: Miki Kashtan on September 18th, 2009 | 8 Comments »
Credit: flickr: ragesoss
“I don’t want this country to become another socialized country like Russia.” These were the words of a woman in a Pennsylvania town hall meeting with Senator Arlen Specter. What is important to this woman? What is behind her concern? What are the dreams and aspirations from which this statement arises?
“Health care for all.” These were the words on a placard in New Hampshire. What is important to the woman who carried this placard? What is behind her concern? What are the dreams and aspirations from which this statement arises?
Credit: flickr: europhile1
What if our town hall meetings were devoted to mutual exploration among people with opposing views to answer these questions together? What would we then discover? How would we then experience our differences in opinions? What might be the common shared dreams that would surface? And what kind of health care system would we then create?
We don’t have to wait for our town hall meetings to change before we can experiment with answering these questions.
As you read the words of the woman in Pennsylvania, and especially if you disagree, try to imagine her. Can you imagine that she dearly values the kind of freedom she experiences in this country, and wants to preserve it? Perhaps she treasures the possibility of individual choice? Maybe she cares very much about efficiency in providing health care? Whatever it is, it appears that she is passionate about protecting what is dear to her. Whether or not you share her opinion, do you share her dreams?
As you read the placard of the woman in New Hampshire, and especially if you disagree with her, try to imagine her, too. Can you imagine that she cares very deeply about the well-being of people in this country? Perhaps she wants that dream to be shared by others, and wants support for making it happen? Here, too, as you reflect on this woman’s words, whether or not you share her opinion, do you share these dreams, too?
Does the first woman not want everyone’s well-being? Highly unlikely. Most likely she, as well as others opposed to health care reform, still want to find a way to support everyone. She simply doesn’t trust that the proposed reform would do that at a cost to freedom that she can bear.
Does the second woman not care about freedom of choice and efficiency? Hardly possible. Most likely she, as well as others who support health care reform, still want to find a way to maintain the level of freedom that is the backbone of this country’s dreams. She just doesn’t trust that the existing systems provide freedom at a cost to others’ well being that she can tolerate.
If these two women could hear each other and fully understand the depth of care they share, they are more likely to maintain a sense of each other’s full humanity, and be willing to work together to craft a system that will provide for everyone’s well being and operate with freedom, choice, and efficiency.
Instead of focusing on entrenching people in their polarized positions, town hall meetings could be facilitated by people who are skilled and equipped to help all participants get to the core of what matters to them, hear each other across the divide, and come to a place of shared holding of all the dreams. This is not a pipedream. Skilled individuals are available. Models of productive citizen deliberation exist and have been successful around the world. What would it take for the people of the United States of America to find a way to make their town hall meetings an opportunity to shape a shared future rather than a battleground?
What would it take for the people of the United States of America to find a way to make their town hall meetings an opportunity to shape a shared future rather than a battleground?
GREAT! LET’S DO IT.
1. DECLARE “TAKE A CONSERVATIVE TO LUNCH” MONTH.
2. WE’LL ALL FIND A CONSERVATIVE TO TAKE TO LUNCH.
3. WE’LL ASK QUESTIONS, LISTEN TO ANSWERS, BUT NOT REPLY.
4. THEN WE’LL COLLABORATE ON A PLAN FOR A TOWN HALL WHERE POINTS OF VIEW WILL BE EXPRESSED PASSIONATELY, BUT CIVILLY.
5. WE WILL AGREE THAT “GOOD WILL TO ALL” IS MORE IMPORTANT FOR THE FUTURE OF OUR NATION THAN OUR IDEOLOGICAL POINTS OF VIEW
As with so many things, I have mixed feelings about this. I completely agree with the idea of finding common ground in our dreams and working together from there. But it is naive and dangerous to deny that there really are people who hate — who do NOT want the common good but only their own. Sometimes I worry that we have legitimized behavior that should not be tolerated in our society by assuming the good will of everyone. Example: discussing the pros and cons of torturing people as if each side had equal moral weight and it is just a matter of which produces the best results. We must learn to stick to our ideals without being “starry-eyed” (meaning dopey.)
Joan, I share your mixed feelings, and I actually think different tactics are needed in different situations. This was well expressed for me by Cherie Brown of the National Coalition Building Institute in a Tikkun Phone Forum last year, when she talked about having to decide in one of her meetings how to respond to a man who stood up and spewed out hateful things about a minority group. Her empathy training and desire to connect with the man made her want to draw him out and ask him questions and get to a point of understanding where his anger came from, a process in which she is very well trained and which her organization has done with remarkable success in meetings in conflict situations of many kinds, meetings of the kind Miki Kashtan is talking about that enable people to empathize across impossible barriers. But in this particular situation because there were members of the insulted minority present, and because of what she knew about them, and because of the nature of the particular meeting, she decided she had to abandon that desire and simply contradict the man and say with considerable forcefulness that he was wrong: thus losing him, but supporting the people who needed it more at that moment.
Even if it’s not appropriate in every case, I do think that her and Miki Kashtan’s approach can actually build genuine connection and understanding — it has happened many times — and one effect is to isolate the inveterate haters, as people who are more open to understanding are drawn towards dialogue and away from the haters.
I would like to see mandated one hour a week of critical thinking from grade 5 on. It’s hard to talk to someone who is ranting against socialism when they can’t define it or say why it’s bad. As was pointed out on the Rachel Maddow Show last week, the states with the worst health care stats, like South Carolina, are the states most strongly against reform. In order to have a real conversation, there must be a mutual desire to define problems and come up with solutions that serve the greater good. Unfortunately, many Americans are shamefully undereducated and are manipulated by folks like Rush and Glen to support positions that are not in their self-interest. When people are coming from a place of blind prejudice, passionately supporting positions that are not based on facts, it’s hard to have a conversation.
A shocking number of Americans don’t know basic facts about history
So many good hearted people, yet so little good fruit being produced by the “left.” Yes, you read that correctly…I am the “conservative” you have invariably called under-educated, full of hate, manipulation and blind prejudice if I may quote your stunningly patronizing posts. Yikes, I just lost my appetite and you want to take me to lunch? Indeed…
Since we are all being so direct and to the point, might you consider the possibility that the education that you esteem so highly needs to be based in reality and not emanating from some tenured ethereal (in the chemical sense) bearded-wonder at a University who has spent his whole life in a book or playing god to naive children whose similar lack of experience causes them to gobble up his drivel as though it were written on two stone tablets. Yet, if this is your foundation, how would you know it? How would one describe a flower garden to someone born blind who could never relate to the concept of light and darkness, much less color? One thing is certain: man’s pride and convenient delusion that truth is subject to his understanding must be replaced with humble belief in what God has said…EVEN if we don’t understand it at the time. This is the definition of a BELIEVER…a child of the living God, YHVH.
Only in this way will mankind find the truth–in his willingness to serve and obey it’s author on His terms, not ours.
Only then will the realities become clear…to them who are of a mindset to follow the truth irrespective of the perceived consequences…on faith. Why should a righteous Holy God reveal His truth to any other? The only obstacle to this are those who would rather construct a god of their own design who conveniently does only what they can understand and condone…idolatry, plain and simple…and why such people end up Marxists who literally worship the State above all. That is the end of your liberal road…and you can keep the “change” because we just don’t want ANY part of such a historically wretched experience. That is the “Egypt” that many of us were blessed to leave, yet the desert trials cause you to want to return to slavery like many criminals who are more comfortable in our liberally run prisons with free a/c, meals and a bed than in a free society! I digress…for that is another subject altogether.
Only then will we see that being born in sin as we all are, we are improved by personal hardship, toil and even pain as was the average person in the USA between 1770 to around 1900…and that even beautiful little children have the seed of sin and foolishness bound up in their wonderful little hearts so that without discipline and correction they become tyrants and thoroughly evil. If this be so in the microcosm of a good family, how much more so in the world at large…yet a desire to make everything wonderful causes many to forget these simple truths. In any case, giving the govt the power and control that we should give only to God is historically the recipe for disaster on a global scale. You may not agree but you are without a successful precedent, which is why so many conservatives are absolutely flabbergasted that otherwise good people would follow after such ridiculous ideas that have NEVER born good fruit in this tired old world. Flabbergasted with naivity, unfounded arrogance and analytical blindness does not equal hate, however.
If you who are so far advanced above such conservative values were willing to try your liberal experiment with your own similarly minded friends and their mentally inbred teachers of such ideas in a kibbutz, you would not find anyone angry with you or hateful of your agenda. So, be honest! You are not as righteous as your pride would have you believe in this ideology of yours are you? No, you want to take my earnings to support your ideology against my will and frankly my dears, we know better…and get angry when you make political plays to steal our God-given abundance to fund your ungodly misunderstandings of what is good and right.
Save your lunch money. You are going to need it if the tyrants you empower with your blind ideology cause those blessed people who carefully serve the living God to flee the chastisement you beg upon yourselves by your disobedient/idolatrous ways. YHVH warned us that we should not want an earthly king…much less the oppressive massive government you seek to make your master…you followers of Korah who seek your own terms rather than obedience to God.
Before sinful pride tempts you to dismisses this as inaccurate or too spiritual for your secular tastes, test yourself: Is there ANYTHING that you would not accept if YHVH revealed it was true? You may want to start with Isaiah 53 and then bounce back to Dt 28 to clarify the non-negotiable terms of restoration and fellowship with God, blessing and yes…what we were created for in the first place (Hint: This does NOT include setting up massive, oppressive, controlling governments with good intentions but terrible track records…that is, if you believe YHVH and His terms as we are commanded to do).
Charles, thank you so much for taking the time to put your view here. I think you haven’t given up on us liberals totally if you feel we are worth explaining things to!
I do hear much anxiety in your comment about how people will turn out in terms of their character if they start to both rely on the charity of others mediated through the government, and if they start to question what God really is saying in the Torah and the bible generally.
My understanding of Jewish history is that it has never been considered simple to understand the Torah — that even if there is a surface explanation, an apparently straightforward and obvious meaning to some word of God or some story, that when you dig deeper you get to different levels of interpretation. So the rabbinic and kabbalistic traditions have argued among themselves and with each other about just what obedience to God entails. There is of course the view that God gave people unusually strong mental equipment which we should use for just this purpose, to work out what we should be doing here on earth and what obedience to God — however one understands God — means.
Is this a liberal vs conservative issue? I can see that if one’s temperament is conservative, one may wish to preserve what one knew and was taught when growing up, or what was the social consensus then, but the content of that consensus may have been actually created by people of liberal temperament in times past. Switching to Christianity, which I know better, I can see that a conservative Lutheran would want to do things the way they have been done for four centuries in her church, even though Luther himself was a raging radical, of the temperament to upset all conservatives in his day: though he did so in the name of an earlier ideal as he understood it, an obedience to a different understanding of obedience to God. In the same way many of the people I know on the Left who are religious people today, believing in God and seeking to be obedient to God, are doing so in the name of ancient religious imperatives to “love the stranger” or “love your neighbor” and ancient understandings that the way you love God is by loving the least of his people. So perhaps they are the most conservative, willing to throw over modern radical innovations like capitalism in favor of community values? Just a thought.
Oh Dave, you have completely missed my point. What you are proud to call new and progressive is as old as Cain who harmed his brother (without help from the State) rather than emulate Abel’s good example of obedience in order to enjoy the resulting blessing…or the liberal activist woman with a dead baby who was happy to see to it that if she could not actually steal what she wanted from another that the State (Solomon) should destroy what the others have by cutting it in half out of a twisted sense of “fairness” eerily similar to liberal democrats’ sense of fairness.
Wealth and blessing is not multiplied by division. As Churchill said: “trying to tax your way to prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by pulling on the handle!” Of course, God’s will was represented by Solomon and his appeal to man’s well-known sinful nature was a ruse designed only to flush out the truth…but not so with the naive liberals in our day who are empowering not-so-naive liberals who have the character of the guilty woman with a dead baby to do Satan’s work of destruction…which would be our just reward for allowing ourselves to embrace such foolish and godless objectives as numbing socialism that falsely offers something for nothing and supplants true charity.
Ever heard that description? The destructive power of leprosy is that it numbs it’s victims so that they do not respond correctly…as your plans also do to whole demographic sectors who have been all but destroyed by the soft bigotry that has prevented them from doing the hard work of personal growth and toil just to survive, which is part of God’s loving chastisement that resulted when sin entered man’s world. A punishment, yes…but sorely needed by sinful mankind to help keep our wandering hearts aware of our fallen condition and need for God’s restoration and forgiveness–not unlike a spirited horse must do much hard work before he begins to listen to his master willingly and produce the fruit which he was made to produce.
Oh, but you know better than to allow every man to deal with his own sinfulness, relationship with God and personal responsibilities HIMSELF. Have all of you short-sighted liberals also prevented your own children from having to make good decisions by giving them everything without requiring any personal discipline or evidence of wisdom or appreciation? No doubt, many of you have the very bitter fruit that this sincere lack of wisdom produces, so you should not wonder why others who have made better choices and have better fruit don’t want to follow your example nationally. However, if your kids are the picture of godly fruitfulness, praise God for blessing you with wisdom and it’s fruit in your families’ lives! My only question to you is why don’t you love minorities, illegal aliens and other victims of your proposed bigotry as much…or at least have faith enough in God to trust that all who are made in His image are blessed with all they need to thrive if they ONLY BE LEFT ALONE IN FREEDOM, free from the enslavement of the welfare state and their poor habits which you enable.
This is so clearly what God intends that to not “get it” indicates a level of spiritual blindness that begs the negative promises found in Dt 28 that we already see coming upon our Nation as more people turn away from God in rebellion or follow their own versions of “god” in idolatry…which is not progressive no matter how well intentioned.
What you are calling “deeper interpretation” is most often referred to in scripture as mysticism and sorcery, Dave. Trying to extrude codes, hidden meanings and double meanings are the efforts of man to be equal with God and superior to/manipulative of others as has been evidenced by carnal leadership from the Pharisees to the Vatican…rather than the simple childlike obedience we are told to pursue. Similar elitist drivel was being pushed as progressive right up to the Babylon captivity, and out of the furnace of that affliction that was designed to remove the “progressive” dross that you allude to as being superior came simple obedience once again that some call Karaite, of which there is a righteous remnant today. The same experience was evidenced in early Christendom when the furnace of affliction produced so much good fruit that Christianity was accepted as the national religion of the world’s ruling empire…only to be convoluted with supposed deeper mysticism and manipulation by carnal leaders to the point that when godly men sought to bring the eternal truth of God’s Word to the common man, the church leaders burned them at the stake. This affliction again removed the dross of progressive manipulators of God’s will from those who were obedient, ushering in the creation of the USA which has until recently chosen obedience to the Word of God as it’s national identity. Thus, we have been known to offer the greatest level of personal freedom and opportunity available to anyone throughout the ages…our chief characteristics being righteousness and liberty…which has bred covetousness and greed among many, leading to a pitiful return to supposedly “progressive” manipulation! Again (in the name of loving your nieghbor)! What they NEED is liberty, opportunity and a system that expects good choices, self-respect, family and church to provide all that God intends.
If I learned what I know from a character like Korah or some other reprobate such as Luther refused to follow that was producing bad fruit, your admonition to pursue progressive change would be well taken. But, that is simply NOT the case! I learned what I know by obedience to God’s Word and experiencing its careful utilization by the most fruitful nation in history (as opposed to liberal theories with terrible track records)…to depart from that heritage only to pursue the ideologies responsible for the very worst atrocities and human failings witnessed by the world at the same time that our nation enjoyed great blessing, peace and prosperity would HARDLY be progressive, Dave…and is most certainly NOT loving or beneficial to anyone, including the “least of these.” Quite the contrary, in fact…and to somehow be so irrational or out of touch with reality to think that “progression” FROM the epitomy of woldwide blessing, peace and liberty TOWARD the ideologies that have DURING THE SAME TIME PERIOD enslaved or killed millions of people and destroyed the property and dreams of hundreds of millions more indicates a self-destructive mechanism that only God himself and complete obedience to Him can possibly remedy.
Dt 28–choose wisely so I don’t have to be a remnant that witnesses the apostasy and downfall of what was once the greatest example of godly wisdom and blessing on Earth. God will be glorified either way.
In His grip,
Charles
PS: Of course I love and care for you. The righteous fight for the good of all and out of love–the world fights for what it wants and justifies unscriptural methods for its twisted sense of what is good. Obama is wrong about almost everything he believes, including his assertion that the USA is a post-Christian nation–evidenced by the fact that in spite of his lies and unconstitutional actions, he is still alive. He has more to fear from those he is beholden to (and I believe will fail to deliver to) than from the gentle and faithful Judeo/Christian foundation of our great nation.
[...] We have had a few posts here talking about how to talk with people across the political divide. Mike Ignatowski wrote about his Conversations at a Tea Party, and Miki Kashtan about Town Hall Blues. [...]