America's health care discussion and ordinary people

This was my first glimpse, believe it or not, today, of the ruckus at the nation's town hall discussions of health care policy (I barely watch television, at all, these days, except when others are watching).



As I watched this video, I thought a lot of the John Legend song I fell in love with this summer.



I highly recommend you watch the all white and black official video to see the human interactions John is singing about in this song.

I think this is a really hard thing for most people to come to terms with.

We are not gods. None of us. We aren't omniscient. We don't have all the right understanding. We don't have all the right positions. We aren't on the right side all of the time.

We're just ordinary people. Trying to sort out the hard stuff.

But, for whatever reasons, like all ordinary people, we get angry and frustrated and impatient with one another and with discussions of the things that matter most to all of us in life.

And we lose our patience, almost always, in my experience, myself included, at just the moment when we need, most, to open our hearts and minds and just listen to one another.

We all would be better for that, I think. Just listening.

I say that as someone who spent 7 years talking as a primary commitment. But if all that time in speech and debate competition has taught me anything, at the end of all of it, it is that I always have much more to learn than I have already figured out, at any particular moment.

And most of the more profound learning I've done in my life has happened when I'm listening rather than when I'm talking.

We have a lot of Americans and people in the world, generally, who would be better off listening to one another more and demonizing each other less. Power is often the culprit. Forcing others' hands only enflames our differences, it doesn't resolve them. And most of those differences have honest grounding in reality. When we are honest enough to sit down with all of them. The clamor for power certainly makes the discussion harder rather than easier. It blinds us with aggression and defense, and anger and frustration with one another, rather than resolving much of anything, for real. That's why I'm so committed to people learning to deal with one another more honestly and maturely, as a matter of course, rather than romanticizing that if we just had enough power we could force everyone to see things or do things our way. It is that impulse that has undone us since the beginning of time, whether we acknowledge that or not. And it is that impulse that is undoing this discussion and debate, today.

Watching these town hall meetings, I am reminded why I so appreciate honest, thoughtful, civil discussion - with, perhaps, more room to talk more honestly and be ourselves a little more; though it would be nice if we could learn to do that in a way that was genuinely respectful with one another.

As boring as my kids and most people seem to find such discussion, the truth is that it is where our more thoughtful and responsible ideas and engagement are likely to come.

These last 10 years have been one long romantic fantasy that with enough power and enough leverage to circumvent such discussion and thought, only then will our problems be forced out of existence.

It is the same fantasy that animated Nazi Germany. The same one that animated Soviet Russia. It is the same fantasy that animates Kim Jong Il's North Korean regime. It is the same one that animates Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's less-that-genuinely-democratic regime in Iran. And the same one that animates all illiberal regimes, from Cuba and China to Zimbabwe and Myanmar.

That fantasy - that enough power will finally rid ourselves of our woes and usher in a new era of right-minded people to finally solve our problems - is the fantasy that has riddled humanity since its origination, nevertheless since the beginning of civilization.

It is strange and ironic, as the kids and I study early hominid evolution, that the very kind of compassion, thoughtfulness, and intelligence that were clearly responsible for the great leaps in evolution for homo erectus and early hominids to learn to cooperate with one another to accomplish shared goals are persistently denigrated in favor of the fantasy that it is our aggression, our basest predatory impulse, that is responsible for our progress and will produce solutions we seek.

It is ironic because it very clearly has been our steps beyond that more aggressive, predatory legacy and toward more a compassionate, thoughtful future that so enabled all of our most serious and significant progress as a species and as cultural groupings within that species.

We fail to see it because we do not like to admit our failings. Largely out of our fear and insecurity that those failings mean more about us than they do really.

When, really, our failures are just part of the learning that makes our more honest and genuine progress possible. It is our learning, obviously to any honest observer, and not our aggression that has persistently signalled our most certain progress. Aggression is now and will always be a part of our nature and a needed response, with thougtful consideration of its use and more patient reflection on our responses, in times of danger. But, generally, even in this realm, in our use of aggression, it is still our more thoughtful reflections on its wise use that best guide our efforts.

I haven't learned this as some wise sage with the purity of distance. I've learned this is a flawed actor in a world of people who has far too often made mistakes with this instinct to aggression. It is my mistakes and my failures, the school of hard knocks, that have taught me as much as my education or my more abstract reflections.

But it is that reflection that guides me in a better direction. In a direction of more genuine progress.

And it is that kind of calm, serious, honest reflection and engagement that should animate this discussion and all serious policy choices that we face.

If we are going to make wiser decisions that is.

Our question is will we take a path of greater wisdom or will we take a path of fantasy and aggressive instinct?

It's not looking well for us, right now. But, then again, it never does. Until we follow a more honest wisdom.

Progress is not determined by every choice we make moving forward. That is the path of hubris. Progress is the lessons learned from the failed logic of past choices. But before we make progress, we have to learn the lessons.

And we can't do that on health care or any other issue without a more honest, cool-headed, open-minded, open-hearted democratic discussion.

Until then, we fumble. Sometimes forward. Often backwards.

As John says, "We're just ordinary people. We don't know which way to go. We're just ordinary people. Maybe we should take it slow."

Progressives are about to learn a really valuable, if unexpected, history lesson in what actually constitutes progress, I think. We all are, probably.

Lots of lessons to learn. Much time will be needed to learn them. Maybe we should take the time to learn them rather than try to substitute hubris for learning.

Because if there is one lesson history teaches without fail, it is that hubris never substitutes for learning. No matter how determinedly we try to avoid all that learning.