One of our wishes for the last week of 2022 is to inspire you with thoughtful wishes for 2023, and we’re hoping you will share yours.
We’re looking for big ideas. They could be on the larger landscape: Given where we stand as a nation, state and community, what is your wish to move us forward? Or they could be more personal: What are you hoping for your family, your colleagues or your friends?
You could describe yours in a paragraph. You could write it as an essay. Our only hope is that anyone reading your thoughts will feel inspired and uplifted.
To kick it off and get the synapses firing, I’ll offer one idea, based largely on a common theme in text messages and emails you’ve sent me this year. My wish is for a platform where people who lean to opposite sides of the political spectrum can talk and reach compromise without absolutists on the fringes shutting down the discussion.
People of a certain age remember when we sought compromises in our politics. We moved away from that in the Bill Clinton years, and we’ve all but stopped it now. Today, the general attitude is I’m right and you are wrong, and unless I get my way entirely, it’s because you want to destroy our country, and we are done talking.
In a compromise, nobody gets everything they want. That’s the basis of compromise. You start the discussion by acknowledging it. You don’t draw lines in the sand.
We meet halfway. Consider the most divisive issue of our age: abortion. A lot of people who oppose it will accept nothing less than an outright ban. And a lot who support it as a right will accept nothing less than free choices. What if you could get reasonable people on both sides together with the starting premise that neither will walk away happy. Starting on opposing sides, could they get to a center?
We can’t do that now, because absolutists slam the door on discussion with vitriol and condescension. They poison the atmosphere to the point where reasonable people drop out. My wish is to remove the absolutists from the conversation – they are a minority of the population – and have a thoughtful conversation.
Leading minds once exhorted us to compromise. Politicians didn’t profit as they do today by vilifying the opposition. But if you vilify someone, how can you compromise with them?
We have a few generations of politicians now who have learned their skills by watching partisan newscasters scorning their opponents. Everywhere, it seems, is another talking head reviling the other side in the harshest terms possible.
But I know from all the emails and text messages I receive (more than 2,000 a month) that most people are not like that. The people I hear from are thoughtful and temperate. And many say they want to get back to civility and compromise. Some wish we had a third political party in the country that eschewed the bitter politicking and hewed to the middle.
If I could host a conversation just with the people who write to me, we might get somewhere. I haven’t figured out how to do that, though. If I did, I fear the absolutists would try to do what they have so effectively done everywhere in public discourse – make public discussion so ugly that civil people walk away.
So that’s it – a place where the many wonderful people I hear from each month, and the many more who are like them, could get together, have discussions, reach comprises and move our society ahead. That’s my wish.
What’s yours?
If you are so inclined, please send it to me at cquinn@cleveland.com. We’ll gather them up and publish them toward year’s end. We’ll keep it anonymous, using just your first name.
Thanks for reading.
