Partisan Fighting Can't Be America's Pastime
If politics are destined to be a team sport, then we ought to play by the rules, practice sportsmanship, and protect the middle ground.
I just started my third term as Mayor of Silverton. I believe that decency is not dead and meaningful discourse is not only possible, but vital.
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A few recent decisions and the sources of subsequent support for them have reminded me (again) just how divided many people are and how much work is yet to be done to bring us all together.
For more than 22 years, during a part of my life that seems so far away, I coached kids and umpired baseball through the Little League program, the JBO program, and at the high school level.
When I was first elected to office in 2004, I often joked that I had prepared to serve as an elected official through that experience as an umpire. At the time, what I really meant was that I was familiar with having people upset with decisions I’d made, and was pretty good at not taking that personally.
Nearly 17 years later however, the analogy is seeming more and more applicable to my experiences with the ever-divided public. Life can be lonely these days for a moderate, apolitical public servant—one who gets equally as disenchanted with the far left as the far right. I use the term “far” in both cases because the citizens to whom that word doesn’t apply seem to sometimes be hiding for their lives as so many others continue to volley missiles at each other, seemingly content to destroy all of the land in-between if it means an ultimate political victory. I call that land in-between the “middle ground,” and believe it’s worth protecting.
When even an issue-based discussion with no political ramifications results in decisions that seem to please only one group, or another, it really does start to feel like a baseball game.
Case in point - as an umpire, maybe some close pitches happened to go one way, as well as a close play at the plate. One side of the stands was filled with happy, cheering people, while the other said I was blind, or incompetent (or both) but either way needed to “go.” The next inning, those close calls happened to go the other way, and the spectators who hated me now cheered wildly in support of my decisions, and the group that had previously been happy with me now had absolutely no use for me (and no memory that they’d supported me 20 minutes earlier).
There was never a line of spectators standing up to say “wait a minute….while we may not always agree with this umpire, we can at least agree that he makes decisions thoroughly, fairly, and without bias.”
That feels a little familiar - 10 years after I last stepped foot on a ball field, I’m still umpiring most days.
The sad truth is that policy making was never meant to be a competitive sport. Yet, too many people show up to public hearings and the like as if they’re at a baseball game. But, if politics is too far gone to ever not be a contest (and they likely are), the worst part may be that some of these “players” and “spectators” don’t even play the game fairly. One of my consistent coaching messages to kids was that the umpire can’t randomly decide the outcome of a game unless we allow them to by failing to take the outcome into our own hands.
Baseball isn’t about the umpire’s calls, it’s about the beauty of nine people working together to use each of their personal strengths to balance the effort and compensate for each other’s weaknesses to achieve a successful outcome. Most importantly, that success should include an understanding that the opponent is trying to do the exact same thing, in order to achieve their own version of a successful outcome.
While both sides are different teams, may have different philosophies of the game, and are unmistakably competing against each other, they can do so just as effectively while showing respect for their opponents, treating them with sportsmanship, and agreeing to keep moving forward regardless of whether that day was a win or a loss.
It’s a lesson that our divided public desperately needs to learn as many of them still apply an “all or nothing” approach to politics. Until each of us is more than just willing to hear opposing views and actually seeks those opposing views to better analyze the situation and the merits of our own ideas, I fear we will just continue to drift apart.
What I do know, without any doubt, is that the people of our towns, of our states, and of this country all want the best for the places we call our own. Unfortunately, the “best” of all things lies squarely in that middle ground that is being put at risk every day.
As an umpire, I could remove players and spectators from the premises if they couldn’t maintain an expected level of decorum. As an elected official and proud citizen, I hope the number of us standing in that middle ground can grow to the point that neither side will risk our safety by continuing this unproductive fight. Political fighting simply can’t become America’s new pastime.