Now, more than ever, we could use some civil discussion

The News Tribune offers its community columnists discretion in what we write about, but we aren’t to be political columnists. It already has nationally syndicated professionals for that niche.

Wise move. While I’m sure any of us could prattle on about our political views, we don’t. Even so, while our column topics haven’t been wildly provocative, we’ve gotten online comments at the paper’s website saying we writers are variously “pathetic,” “self-serving” and “should never have children or pets.” Ouch.

OK, no one takes anonymous online commentary seriously, but given such responses, I’m fine leaving the regular writing of political columns to others and submitting a letter to the editor if I’m so moved.

While politics do invite passions which can turn corrosive, I was involved in a process some years ago that gives me reassurance, even in today’s often divisive political climate. The experience gave me the sense that, though political differences are real and consequential, when the heat is turned down, regular citizens can be thoughtful and quite reasonable about public policy matters. We can find much more of the overused but accurate term “common ground,” even on incendiary topics, than you might imagine.

It wasn’t a kumbaya experience that led me to this view. It was through employing a process that involved some work.

In the 1980s, the Kettering Foundation devised a program built around community discussions of issues with public policy implications. These National Issues Forums had useful ground rules. There would be a facilitator, and groups would use booklets produced by NIF as starting points for discussion. Each booklet presented three quite different views on the topic. They were remarkably neutral in that each position was presented seriously, clearly and without obvious bias. In addition to the policy implications of viewpoints, underlying values informing them were discussed.

Our forums were not debates to be won. Respect for differing views was critical as was encouraging actively listening to others, not just mulling how you would respond to that questionable comment coming from someone apparently channeling your uncle at Thanksgiving. The process worked.

Its’s not that we all agreed at the end of these discussions. Hardly. However, as the conversations evolved, invariably there was more agreement on controversial topics than anyone might have imagined at first. And if we disagreed, we knew more precisely what our differences were and what values underlay those positions – interestingly values we often shared.

This process was used in libraries, colleges, adult education programs (where I was a facilitator in Tacoma), faith communities and even prisons around the country. Each year around one million adults participated in these forums.

I was asked to present about NIF at a 1994 conference in Portland on peacemaking and negotiation. Presenters there included people involved in negotiations in the Middle East, Northern Ireland and the then-hot conflict in the Balkans.

After my presentation, an older priest from Northern Ireland came up to me, impressed with the forums, but asking how I thought they might be applied where he came from. Many young men he worked with had automatic weapons they were willing to use. I said, in so many words, that’s beyond my pay grade. In fact, meetings like these did occur later in Northern Ireland, but this process is hardly a panacea.

Even so, NIF groups were formed around this time in the emerging democracies of the former Soviet bloc in Central and Eastern Europe. They continued, as well, in the United States.

These were happening at a time when other forces were working in a contrary direction, pulling Americans apart politically. In-your-face talk radio was becoming a political and cultural force, and 24-hour cable channels were forming whose purpose is not, shall we say, to find agreement. Later, the Internet and blogs further increased the heat, may have decreased actual face-to-face discussions and contributed to an echo chamber where some of us listen to and read those who agree with us and throw bumper-sticker slogans at those who don’t.

Sometimes it feels like NIF came at the wrong time, in an era when the tone and volume of political discourse was moving against the forum model. While disagreement is fine and even vital to democracy, the chronic bombast of much political commentary in these newer formats is discouraging.

When all this gets tiresome, I remember the groups I was involved in. They did tough work. We had to put aside our egos and pat slogans. The results, however, were encouraging.

I strongly suspect the same ability for useful discussion is still there.

Bruce McDowell, who lives in Tacoma with his wife, is “quasi-retired” after several decades in teaching/social services. He is one of six reader columnists whose work appears in this space. Email him at bmcdowell@harbornet.com.