Saturday, August 30, 2008

The High Cost of Speaking Up

God, how I dread these times. This political season is bound to be filled with all kinds of hard feelings that come from hard words spoken harshly. I was thinking about this when I came across a good blog entry by Laura Benjamin titled "8 Reasons Why People Don't Speak Up." She wants to express why she thinks John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin is a politically brilliant move (and I agree that it was very clever and could be a game changer in the election). But she won't for a number of reasons, such as retribution from others, being branded as politically incorrect, being branded as "different," and more.

I couldn't agree more. Over the years, I have been rebuked and accused of being "too liberal," "too conservative," "too corporate," against the defense of our country, too willing to excuse the military/industrial complex, insensitive to women, a pantie waist feminist, .... The list goes on. Hm, I have a wide range of views there. I must be a schizophrenic.

As a professional communicator, I am shocked at how resistant people are to information that doesn't fit their paradigm. A good example are the proclamations of entertainer Rush Limbaugh. I really try to listen to his program every once in a while, but within 15 minutes, I usually hear about 10 things that I know to be factually untrue. (See The Way Things Aren't on the nonpartisan website FAIR for more on the unknowing utterances of Rush.) His fans, the "ditto heads" (could they have accepted a more self-loathing term?) jump immediately to his defense, facts be damned.

And I'm not criticizing only the right side of the political spectrum. When David Souter was being considered for the Supreme Court more than 20 years ago, a co-worker said that we needed to oppose him because he had no paper trail (i.e., it wasn't clear how he stood on certain issues). I asked why that was a problem, and the co-worker responded that Souter was a threat to the right to an abortion. I pointed out that many men people behaved differently once they put on those judicial robes, and their subsequent records on the Supreme Court can be quite unpredictable. For example, Hugo Black was once a member of the Ku Klux Klan, but became a passionate defender of civil rights. Earl Warren, the poster child of judicial activism, was nominated for the job because he was an arch conservative in California. His tenure on the Court was the exact obvious of whatever was expected. So I assured my friend that his case was a hard one to make, given the absence of information.

He looked at me contemptuously and said, "Well, it's obvious that you don't care for a woman's right to choose!"

Huh? I said nothing about that issue. All I said was that Supreme Court nominees are hard to predict. But it wasn't what he wanted to hear. I guess because I wasn't with the guy, I was against him. That long-ago discussion was a harbinger of what we learned over the last several election cycles: Nuance doesn't mean much in national elections. Broad, bumper sticker slogans, whether it's "a woman's right to choose" or "my right to own a gun," play much better. (Oh, for the record, I was right about the unpredictability of David Souter. He became a key supporter of abortion rights, and a subsequent thorn in the side of the Republicans who nominated him for the bench.)

This is an important election, but every election is important. We never know the situations Presidents will face (or the situations they will get us into). We need to determine to the best of our ability whether they have the requisite judgment to make wise decisions. So we have to air all the dirty little issues that are forbidden in polite company. Does Barack Obama really have enough experience? Does getting shot down in Vietnam really qualify John McCain as Commander in Chief? Given that fully ONE THIRD of all U.S. Vice Presidents have ascended to the Oval Office, do we want Joe Biden or Sarah Palin as our possible Chief Executives? Which of these two is truly more qualified?

These are important issues. And we should be able to discuss them in our personal exchanges without resorting to name-calling, taking observations out of context to ascribing an entirely different meaning to them, or writing someone off as "out of touch" (which BOTH sides do). Until then, I don't blame us for not wanting to discuss these issues in public. The costs to our relationships, our reputations and even our self-esteem are much too high.

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