Middle Ground on the Playground

I found it curious how many people were ready to kiss the world goodbye over an ancient Mayan misperception.  Even though there was a rational and plausible explanation for the end of the Mayan calendar, many folks held out at least some possibility that the sun would not come out tomorrow. 

During my tenure at a large corporation, people often walked around with a similar sense of doom.  In my eleven years there, we had large-scale riffs at least three times, laying people off with no notice and scarcely more than a howdy-do.  Because the aftermath was so devastating—even for those of us who were invited to stay—the environment became a sort of pressure-cooker.  We worked under the constant stress of needing to outperform, quarter after quarter.  Once, when senior management had been sequestered behind closed doors for the better part of a week, I asked my boss if there were going to be lay-offs again.  His response:  “You don’t get off that easy.  You have to stay and make it all work.”

It seems as if our society has fallen into this type of a trap.  We no longer feel compelled to find resolutions.  Rather, we let things fester and escalate, hoping that something will come along to relieve our suffering and take the problems away from us.  The end of the world was a convenient excuse to let chores and bills ride.  We do the same thing with election cycles.  Look how little was accomplished in Congress during the last year, betting on the false inevitability of a new administration.   There is little difference between December 22^nd and the morning after the November elections; the sun still rose on a new day filled with old problems.  As we were fond of proclaiming in my company:  same bullshit, different day.

As a melting pot, we are a country of people with a broad array of ideas and differences.  By its very design, our government is adversarial and polarized.  Our Founding Fathers understood that compromise is essential for unity—that’s why we lock up our representatives in one place far from home and give them deadlines to resolve issues.  General elections are designed to poll the will of the people, leaving our elected officials to represent our interests in the give-and-take of law-making.  Of course, it has never really worked this way.  Instead, the chambers are filled with acrimonious proceedings where many officials engage in personal battles of wills.  It is a giant game of “chicken.”  We have lost the spirit of fair play and social justice, replacing it with a system where “I cannot win unless you lose.”

The next “end of the world” is the so-called Fiscal Cliff deadline.  I find it distressing to see our partisan drama played out for the world to see.  We decry other nations for refusing to find balance and compromise, yet this is the very example that we put on display.  When two sides are this far apart, there is always middle ground.  Yet our officials are afraid to step up and compromise, lest they be castigated by their own parties.  I call working toward a win-win situation “leadership.”  Apparently, there is a new name for this type of bipartisan behavior:  political suicide.

Learning to share and take turns is the most basic of developmental skills.  Most children learn this on the playground before they enter kindergarten.  Digging in one’s heels is never a winning strategy—not for children or adults.  In policy making, as in life, no one gets exactly what they want.  It is better to fall short of doing enough of the right thing than to do nothing at all.  Perhaps we need to resort to schoolyard tactics to motivate our leaders.  If all the Congressmen play nicely together, let’s give them milk and cookies.