Finding Common Ground: A KPR Conversation

After an especially divisive election, how do we find common ground? I'm Kay McIntyre and today on KPR presents, we talk to Kansas voters on both sides of the aisle on where we go from here. We've invited five Trump voters and five Clinton voters to the KPR live performance studio for a conversation moderated by Jennifer Wilding of Consensus KC. Before we hear from our voters, Jennifer, tell me what is Consensus KC? Consensus is an organization that puts the public and public policy. We give people a voice and important decisions that are going to affect their lives. And we help municipalities and communities move past kind of the old public hearing model where it's like two minutes at the microphone. Here's what I want to a more deliberative approach. So you get some information, you have a chance to consider different ways to look at the issue and then you make some of those hard choices that are part of public policy issues. So we help communities that seek to bring people together and find that common ground

across differences of ideology or whatever differences are dividing us. What do you hope will come out of today's conversation? We know and we do not want to think that we might change people's minds. That is not the point for today. But I've done conversations with people on a lot of different issues over the years. And the conversations that we have where we have that really, that real range of perspectives at the table are some of the most rich and most interesting conversations that we have. And what we often find is that after these conversations, people leave saying, I don't agree with the other perspective. But you know what? I listened to what they had to say. And I can see if I had their life experiences that I might feel that way. And so what I'm hoping to come out with is for people to get a sense of one another as

human beings. We're not going to be asking about tweets or TPP or what one candidate did with another during the election. But rather we're going to be talking about maybe deeper things. Like how did we learn about what makes a good citizen or things that really allow us to find common ground? Jennifer Wilding is Executive Director of Consensus K.C. and the moderator for today's KPR presents. We've invited five Trump voters and five Clinton voters to the KPR live performance studio this weekend to talk about how to find common ground after one of the most divisive elections in recent history. Let's meet today's participants. I'm Doug. I'm Rochelle. I'm Brad. I'm Carl. George.

Shannon Carriger. Our group, which includes voters from Lawrence, Overland Park, Topeka, Olaytha, Ottawa, and Osage County. We start today's conversation not here and now in 2017, but back in our earliest years. Think back to when you were children. When you were growing up at home, what did you learn about being a good citizen? Things that I recall being taught mostly by example were to work hard, being engaged in your community and your family, to take care of your neighbors, to look after them because they certainly looked after us. Another thing that sticks with me is a sense that when I encounter people to look forward to that, even when they're different than I am. My folks were all about looking forward to meeting people with different backgrounds and we had and to embracing that and to embrace those differences. Those are the things that stuck with me growing up.

I was raised in a working-class household. My mom worked in a factory until I was 10 and my father is a laborer and those things instilled in me the need to work hard for what we wanted in life, but also that your job wasn't the entirety of who you were. Both of my parents had passions outside of their professions and they both pursued those passions and so I learned early on that the things that nourished me creatively and personally were equally as important as my job and I also learned an adage in my house was any room that I walked into. I was no better than anyone in that room and no one in that room was better than me. That we lived in a very equal world. My family and the people that I encountered as a child were a very diverse and that allowed me to see the importance of promoting equality and lifting up everyone around me to that end. I was fortunate enough to be born in 1927 and I grew up during the Great Depression and ended up in the Great World War II.

You learn a lot by being raised during a point in your country's life or nobody has anything. We talk about hours, hours this, hours that, what this belongs to me, this belongs to him. You don't have that in a great depression like we had. What you had was everybody in my small town looked out for everybody else. You just had to. If you had five sticks of wood and your neighbor had no sticks of wood, you shared. You learned that early on. When World War II was declared, I was 14 years old and I can tell you this, the minute we were attacked in World War II, everybody rallied around each other to come up with the same lifestyle that we had during the Depression.

That's why I feel I was fortunate to have been born before the Depression, to grow up during the Depression, to be 14 years old when we were attacked by the Japanese and to end up in the United States Navy. So that's how you learn how to get along, how to get along with yourself, your neighbors, your country, everybody else that's involved in your life. I grew up in the 80s and grew up with a strong sense of family and the importance of sticking up for each other and that extended to our neighbors and with that came a duty and that meant that we needed to be involved in the public life and the civic life. So I was taught, you do that by voting. That was the only way I really saw that to tell you the truth, but that was important

to my parents and they didn't still that within me. I was also raised in a faith community and so the sense of everyone doing to others as you would have others doing to you, that was strong as well. So I think both of those were equally important to me, the sense that yes, I needed to treat others equally and I also need to show support in the civic arena by the looking at the policies that are out there and voting. I grew up in a home of a successful business owner, my father though was very much a product of the depression and had him self grown up very poor. So the lesson that I learned growing up was that you work hard, you don't expect it to be given to you and you play by the rules and if you do those things then you'll do well. That was sort of the overarching message of the home I came from. I grew up in Southwest Missouri on a small farm where I learned the value of hard work,

staying on task, being honest and trustworthy and being involved in the community, helping neighbors and I guess I was a child of depression, of the depression and we didn't have any money to speak of, you counted the pennies in those days and that wasn't any problem because in our farm neighborhood we were all the same. The neighbors didn't have any money to eat it but we did have plenty to eat and thinks and plenty to wear and that sort of thing so we really didn't suffer like maybe folks in the urban areas dead. The neighbors were helpful with each other. I can remember one time we had a neighbor who's back in those days some of the farmers raised cane, C-A-N-E and if a cow ate the cane they would poison them and they would die and we had a neighbor, his cows got out and got in somebody's cane patch and he

lost six cows and that was about his livelihood but anyway I can remember my dad and another fella got together and they went around the neighborhood to raise money to buy the guy another cow or two or three to get started so pretty simple in those days compared with today but anyway I had a great time growing up on the farm and remained there until time to go to the service in World War II. I don't remember my parents ever talking to me about really how to treat other people issues like that but only in the last few years I realized that some of the things I learned I learned from what I didn't hear. I didn't hear them gossip. I didn't hear them talk about different groups of people. I just didn't hear that kind of thing and I don't know why it was that way but it was and I think that just sunk into my head in a way that I didn't realize for a long time. I was very lucky.

I grew up in the 1950s. I was white, middle class, life was good from the Presbyterian Church. I learned, follow the golden rule, I was in Boy Scouts, I love government in history classes, I was in speech and debate in high school and my view was being informed, educated, citizen and a voter and respect other people's opinions. I was born in New York City, little different than most of you. My father was in the greatest generation. He was gone when I was born. In fact, he was gone until I was about seven. Then he got called back for Korea and we spent most of our life wandering around the country. The thing I learned mostly was that there are a lot of very different people and you need to get along with them or they're not going to get along with you and you also learn service. This last election, people were engaged maybe more than they had been in previous elections. People were thoughtful about who they were voting for and what the issues were.

My question for you is what would you like this group to know about what your vote means to you? I don't think I have ever missed a congressional or presidential election. I started voting in 1980, some of the smaller local elections I miss, but one of the lessons I learned growing up is that you pay attention and you're involved. My father ran for public office when I was 12 years old. You pay attention and you participate. What I appreciated about my background was that my parents had friends from a variety of perspectives. One of the rules we always violated was we did talk politics even when the conversation got intense. What it means to me is it's my chance to express myself and express my convictions. When I vote, I just feel a part of. There have been times when I have missed local elections.

I haven't missed any presidential since I've been old enough to vote, but when I've missed those elections, even though I may not have felt strongly about any of the candidates or any of the issues, there was just something that I missed and it's hard to put my finger on, but I just felt kind of out of the scheme of things. When I vote, I just feel I'm a part of something, whether my party wins or not. For me, my vote feels like kind of a sacred thing. I live in a small town and when you go to the polling place, these are people that you know from around the community, you know from church and from the grocery store and it feels like we're more of a community then. I know we have really diverse points of view, but it really feels like a sacred moment. When we're all there together, people come in, they do their part to support moving us ahead as a country and it really feels like a weighty issue when I'm voting. I have a unique perspective in that I don't have children of my own, but I teach the

children of, I would say, thousands of people by this point in my 10 years in a high school classroom and I have nieces as well and when I vote, my vote is about creating the world that I hope will encourage and nourish them to become the strongest possible citizens they can and to be respectful of the other views and to understand while my vote might not be the same as my neighbor, my neighbor has the right to vote differently from me and so that makes the process even more meaningful. Even though I grew up with that value of voting, I have to say that I don't think it meant much more to me than just a road activity until I became a teenager and that age we tend to become a little more aware of the world around us and start asking more questions. My parents divorced when I was 12 and that I believe was a critical moment in my life. From that point on, I was the daughter of a single woman and that's different than being

the daughter of a married couple and I was the only one in my community of my close circle of friends, I should say, that was the child of divorce. So I started paying attention even more because my mother had stayed home and until this divorce happened and she had a college degree thank goodness so she was able to go out and find jobs but it was not easy for a woman in her mid-40s to do that at that time. And though it was the mid-80s and so I saw policy from a very different perspective it became very personal to me. So I took that in the value that was instilled of voting, I became much more serious about it and I thought, well, hold on, it's not just about voting for who my dad thinks but I also felt like it made me more critical of the institutions that were in power. And so, as a teenager in high school, I just grabbed this idea of civic involvement

kind of by the horns and I decided I am going to be an active participant and I'm going to vote in a way that can actually help people that are maybe not exactly like me because now I know a little bit about what that's like. Yes, I take a larger view on it and that when you watch the news, there are a lot of people in this world, men and women that don't have the luxury of having a voice and having their vote counted and so I view it as my duty, a privilege, an honor, a responsibility for people who say they're not interested or can't be bothered. I can't relate to that because there are people in this world that would give anything to have the opportunity to be counted and have their opinion contribute to the larger picture of where they live.

If you're just joining us today on KPR presents, it's a voter roundtable. We've gathered five Trump voters and five Clinton voters from the KPR listening area to talk about the 2016 election and where we go from here. I'm Kay McIntyre, this discussion was moderated by Jennifer Wilding of Consensus KC. What single value do you think best defines the greatness of America? What single value do you think best defines the greatness of America? Freedom, diversity. My answer is slightly longer. Because I teach early American literature and I teach documents that are part of the foundations of this country, the thing that I see echoed over and over and over again is the collective. It's the we. That pronoun shows up so much. What we do together and so I would say that working together, partnership and cooperation, even across party lines, even with people who diametrically oppose your own belief system,

that ability to say what is the greater good is more important than my individual intention. I've kind of seen things along that same line. In times when I felt like my beliefs were so out of step with the government, I've kind of comforted myself by thinking about that the American people are just good people. Set the government aside, we tend to be good and we tend to be kind. And if there's a part of the country that's having a hard time, they've got something going on. Americans go there and they help. They send their money. They do what they need to do to help those other people. We do that for other countries too. When we see that there's a need, the American people will pitch in, they'll raise funds or whatever they do to try to point attention in that area. And that's something that concerns me about the way the climate is turning now. Are we still willing to help other Americans no matter who they are?

I guess I'm in violent agreement with both of you. I think that sets America apart is that we have so many institutions and so many laws that cause us to work for the collective good. I think that's a powerful force. I think that's the way it was intended. And I think that collective doesn't stop even at our borders, but I think when we work to help everyone, that's exactly what we achieve, a stronger country and a greater good. I think about liberty. I think about my upbringing, the civic involvement I've had, whether it was as a legislative aid or a representative as a councilwoman in the town, I lived in the San Francisco Bay area. And it's very easy to surrender your freedom or your liberty. It's very difficult to get it back once you've done that. And when you take a higher elevation view and you look at the consequences, whether

intended or otherwise, of decisions that we make as individuals or as a collective as a policy, it's very difficult to get things back once you've let them go. Our history of being found as a country demonstrates that. I think the opportunities that we have in this country, among those opportunities, I would write number one, the opportunity to be the best that we can be. And I think that goes back to what Diane said, and that's freedom. I've been seeing a lot of different attitudes on people's Facebook post lately. Just people dealing with the current situation in different ways. But I saw this one, and it wasn't even a person I know. But she said, this is what I've decided that I want to do right now. I want to open doors for people. I want to smile at people. I want to say hi. Maybe I want to carry their groceries. She just had a list of just ordinary random act of kindness. And I thought, perfect, that's just perfect. It doesn't have to be a big struggle to change something.

If somebody did something like that for me, one of those little things, I would just feel bonded with that person in a small way in that moment. And I personally think that that's the way to go with this. Thank you. I'm seeing a lot of heads nod at that comment. What do you think, and a little darker side? What do you think is the biggest threat to the greatness of America? I think the greatest threat is that we are so independent as a person that we don't need the collective. I grew up with that mentality of pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps, and I do believe that we are responsible for our actions and what happens to us in life. I also feel though that in our sense, the desire to be so strong and independent, we don't get to open doors for people. We don't smile at them. We won't engage them in ways that really would open us up to working more together so that we don't become as somehow divided as we have.

I think the greatest threat is intolerance. And also intolerance in the face of what people perceive is intolerance on someone else's part. I see, again, referencing Facebook, which seems to be a new reality, unfortunately, for relating to people. Someone perceives someone views as intolerant, and therefore they unfriend them or they become intolerant of them. Well, that's of itself intolerance. Diversity is meaning means you tolerate people's views that are different from your own, even if you see them as intolerant. You can unfollow someone and not unfriend them. You know what I mean? If someone is posting things or you're finding it really objectionable, rather than unfriend just unfollow so you don't have to see it. But I think tolerance is key, and tolerance is a challenge because sometimes you need to tolerate what you may view as intolerable. I'd like to pick up where you left off with that Doug.

I was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. I relocated here a number of years ago, but the bulk of my life has been lived in the San Francisco Bay Area. And California is a very diverse place, but not frankly very diverse and thought. And so as someone that worked for the only state elected Republican in the San Francisco Bay Area, if I was going to do a good job and serve the people, I need to be able to work with others. And that means that you have to humanize people. You have to get beyond your own opinion. You have to get beyond your own ideology of yourself and others. And you have to realize, like another panelist here has said, look, we're all Americans. We all love our families and one good things. How we view the path of getting there may differ, but I believe I could sit down with Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, you name the person.

And I could find something lovely and in common with each of them. Does that mean I agree with them? Not necessarily on certain things. But does it mean that they are, you know, to the right hand of Satan? No. So I view the political correctness on all sides of the lack, the need to shut people down. That is what creates the division and polarizes things. And if we take a step back and take a deep breath, it's very easy to say something when your mom's basement posting on Facebook. It's really quite different when you're standing very close to their personal space and spewing the same venom in hatred. So I think people need to remember we're all humans, we're all Americans, and at the end of the day, we love this country. Your original question was the threat, the greatest threat, I believe? The biggest threat to the greatness of America. I agree with so much of what's been said before. And I think my perspective shows me that vulnerability is a threat if we don't allow for it. If we see vulnerability as a weakness, then we see that weakness as something we don't

want to space, we don't want to occupy ourselves. We have to be vulnerable enough to admit when we're wrong. We have to be vulnerable enough to ask for help. We have to be vulnerable enough to say, this is my perspective, and my perspective comes from my experience, and while your experience is different, I'm still willing to hear about it. We have to be willing to be hurt, and I actually think in a little bit in opposition about unfollowing people, though I certainly have done so. I think that we have to walk in the direction of our fear. I think we have to ask ourselves, am I willing to have that difficult conversation? And we have to be vulnerable in that conversation. I had a Facebook encounter yesterday. Woman that I grew up with, I have not seen in years, but we've kept in contact via social media as many of us are able to do now. And I made a post yesterday just about how I was feeling right now.

And the response I received from her was rather dismissive of my position and very supportive of hers. And while I would normally, prior, I think to this last few months, have unfollowed maybe deleted that comment, instead I said, this wasn't directed at you. This is about how I feel today. And I find it disrespectful and hurtful that you chose to say this to me. And she responded and said, that's how I felt about your post. And I responded back to her. And I said, I've never come to your personal page on Facebook. I've never disrespected your opinion. I respect you as a person. We just fundamentally disagree here. And I was shaking when I was typing those things because I felt like I was opening myself up to be attacked. But the vulnerability was necessary because I believe it's the only way we move forward.

I feel like the greatest threat is just us being split apart. We have so many different sources for news and opinions. And what I see with people that I know is they tend to flock to places that will reinforce what they believe a lot of times instead of going to a source that may make them reassess what they already believe. I just feel there's so much polarization. And when you talk about tolerance, I have mixed feelings about that because I feel like tolerance can often be condescending. And it's like, oh, okay, I don't agree with you, but I'll tolerate you. Sometimes I kind of get that feeling out of it and it makes me uncomfortable. And when you talk about, you know, unfriending people and stuff like that, I think there comes a point when you may have to. I had a person in my life who was so filled with anger and hatred that whether or not I agreed with what she was saying in principle, it made me feel just toxic listening to her

sometimes. And that's too bad, but I'm hoping she can find a way to get through it. If that's a cathartic experience for her, that's great if she can move on after going through that. That's one thing. But I think there are times when you have to say, this isn't good for me to be with this. And one of the biggest threats, maybe the biggest threat to us in our country is when we lose our desire to know our neighbors. If I neighbor, I mean not just to lose down the street, but really who we encounter. I know a lot of people, including me, that was shocked as we got closer to this election to hear friends' opinions. And that was really eye-opening. And I realized I was really unaware of a lot of their very strong feelings. And I realized I didn't know them as well as I thought I did. So to me, that's really important that we know one another, that we are open, whether the conversation becomes really contentious, or if it's just the regular stuff that we

talk about day in and day out, but to me, that's really critical that we know. Because then I can understand and I can integrate your thoughts and your priorities into my own. And that's what helps us all become better citizens and better neighbors. Brad, I'd like to actually follow up on that comment because it occurs to me. A lot of you are talking about social media and how that is coloring our interactions with people. And when you say a lot of us don't really know our neighbors anymore, it occurs to me that many of us know a lot about people on Facebook, our friends on Facebook, and their political opinions and their postings, but not necessarily the people around us. And that in some ways, and I hate to blame social media for this, but that in some ways, we say things on social media that you would never say to a person face to face, or that comment that you meant it to be funny, but it came off as sounding snippy or condescending

or whatever. And I wonder if part of the problem isn't not that we don't know each other or know our neighbors, but that we know them in sort of the wrong way that social media has made this a really uncomfortable kind of intimacy in a very non-intimate setting, and that the real-life interactions, like you and all of you coming together to talk about this today, we don't do this nearly enough. Amen. I'll just follow up quickly. I agree with that. I'm not very active on social media, but I know, in talk with my wife, she'll talk about exchanges with people that she's very close to, and they'll say something that somebody will say something that's pretty vitriolic, and when she responds, they'll say, oh, I didn't mean that about you. So it's like two different levels of communication, and I worry about that personal level. So I'll let other people talk about the social media part.

I think anonymity emboldens us, and this is a form of digital literacy that we teach in classrooms, or I hope that we are teaching, I teach. And it really comes back to empathy, and trying to know what's at the heart of someone, and I don't think you can when someone is allowed to be cloaked behind a social media presence. Many of the students that I teach have a very different presence online than they have in person. And I think that it's important when we think about how the education process works, that we recognize the more technology we include in classrooms, the more we lose the intimacy of human interaction, which is a very important skill, and something we should all be trying to engender in our daily lives, and certainly in the lives of the humans that we are raising to be in charge of us later. I think the greatest threat we have is that we don't compromise anymore. When I was younger, I worked with our federal congress, I was a liaison officer. And back then, regardless of which side of the aisle they were on, you could get things

done. They were going to stay talked to each other, and they didn't, you know, my bad mouth each other on a radio, we didn't have as much TV back then, and we didn't fight for 30-second soundbites, but they could work together under the cover to get it done. And I think social media contributes to that problem. I think a lot of things contribute to that problem, and you're not going to get anything done if we can't recognize that the other party doesn't agree with us, but we can find common ground in order to make progress, enough said. If you're just joining us today on KPR presents, it's a voter round table. We gathered five Trump voters and five Clinton voters from the KPR listening area to talk about the 2016 election and where we go from here. I'm Kay McIntyre. You're listening to KPR presents on Kansas Public Radio. This discussion was moderated by Jennifer Wilding of Consensus KC.

The next question is related to the parties that you normally support. So my question is this, in what ways this last election have you felt out of step with the party that you generally support, or in what ways does a party that you normally support not fully reflect what's most important to you? I was really out of step with my party. I was surprised at the nominee we got, if I guess if that indicates who I, what party I'm with, to this day, I don't understand how that ended up happening. I guess there are things happening out there that maybe our party wasn't tuned into what's going on at the grassroots level. Maybe my party had become disconnected from the grassroots. As it got closer and closer to the election, I found myself feeling just like things were

spiraling out of control. And I just didn't have a handle on it. A few days after the election, I saw this cartoon and there was a building and it said Democratic Party on the top of it. And then it had about six doors. And above each door was one had African-American, one had pro-choice women, one had unions, one had Hispanics, and different titles like that. And there was a middle-aged white couple and they had walked past the building and the man said to the woman, I couldn't find my entrance. And that just, that jelt for me, whether I agreed with any group or not, there were just people that couldn't find where they fit. I was very comfortable at the state level with my party and I voted for people in that and I'm pleased with that. At the national level, I was not comfortable with either the Republican or the Democratic presidential nominee.

Say more about that. In terms of their personality, what they represented, I couldn't get enthusiastic about either. And I saw other people that were passed over and I thought, oh, I would have been more comfortable with them, both Democrats and Republicans. You know, I voted every election, but it's getting harder and harder because I can't hold my nose as long between the two parties. I can't find anybody in either of them that represents my basic feelings. They're all off over here somewhere. What did they miss? Well, to me, they're missing the average American who works hard, you know, brings home a paycheck, tries to take care of his kids, tries to get them educated, you know, and they're here and these guys are talking about stuff that may be important, but these people have concerns and they don't hear a lot about their concerns.

You know, you talk about jobs, okay, and I'm getting specific and I want to get to policy. But you know, for every time we talk about the globalization, somebody here gets hurt. And we don't have any process for dealing with the people who get hurt while we have national policy to tribal the globalize. You know, I find that important. I mean, I don't have a problem with the idea of globalization, but I have a problem with hurting people and we do a lot of that. For me, my concern with both candidates, as I've said for this election, is the issue of integrity. I don't expect candidates to be perfect, particularly when you get on that national stage, everything's kind of in view and there's lots of imperfections to go around. But integrity, that ability to make the things that you do match what you say really makes a difference to me and I felt like that was lacking and so it made me not very enthusiastic

about this election because I thought that lacked. I thought people, the candidates weren't good at telling the truth and dealing with tough issues where they, you know, maybe they weren't in a very flattering light, but I didn't think that either candidate was very good at owning up to that. And those kind of things, integrity is what gets you through tough situations and I was worried about that because I didn't think either candidate showed very much of that. That question about how this election may do feel out of step with your own party and I've heard a lot of you say that you were comfortable with a number of the other candidates but not necessarily who ended up at the top of your ticket. Did this election make you feel disenfranchised or like the system itself didn't work? We have a robust system to try to select a presidential candidate or presidential nominees,

didn't make you feel like there was something wrong with the system that we could end up with two candidates that were, by most accounts, the most unpopular presidential nominees in recent history. I think that some of this is a result of our complacency of citizens as well. I did strongly support one candidate but wasn't my maybe top ideal choice but once the nominee was announced I supported her, I think that we have, I agree with some of what Georgia is saying and our system becomes what we expect. And I think for many, many years, so many of us, and I haven't, we all aren't as involved as we can be. There's local grassroots elections that matter. All elections have consequences. So I think it's wonderful that we can have this discussion as a result of the national election. That's great we're talking.

But our small elections, every two years, we have elections that we can make a difference in. And we can run in. We can encourage people to run in that really do represent our values. Yeah, it's local, it's small, it doesn't get the flashy publicity of the big races. But I think it starts at our school council and the city council, the school board, it starts there. When I got real frustrated this last six months ago and I decided what can I do to make a difference? I wasn't happy with the process. So I did become involved with my local party as a precinct committee woman. It's easy to do. Both parties are struggling at your county level to find people to fill these positions and the amount of work I had to do was really very minimal. It's about getting out and talking to the people, talking to my neighbors, talking to those that live around me. So I encourage people on that level to, these conversations are important and necessary too.

But I think we have to do a little bit more at our small level. I've got two kids at home. So it's not as if I have a bunch of spare time, but I determined I was going to do this. And I think other people can do that too. I think in a way our system is set up to give us unsatisfactory results because I hear in most elections people say, well, I'm not happy with either candidate, but this one is the lesser of two evils. I hear that so much. And it's almost like we are pushed into voting for one of the two major party candidates because if we don't, it's going to take enough votes away that the candidate we really don't like might get elected. And I remember there was several elections ago. There was a third party candidate I voted for. And I knew being in Kansas, it wasn't going to have an impact. But it turned out to be a contentious election on the national level. And there was some thought that this third party candidate took away enough votes that it

did sway the election. And I think that we're so scared of stepping out and taking chances. And so I think there is failure in a lot of people's minds. Well, that's a great segue to the next question, which is, what aspects of the party that you don't generally support do you admire or do you see as a reasonable counterbalance to the party that you do support? So I grew up in a household that kind of taught me in a lot of ways to be suspicious of big business. But I work in a big business. And so my life has been about adjusting and trying to figure out where the truth is and what I should believe. One of the things that I appreciate about the Republican Party is that they try to take things from a pragmatic level, they try to consider what businesses need to be successful. And to keep that in balance, and I appreciate that.

We had a conversation in my classroom, an ongoing conversation related to the election. Many students were interested and wanted to discuss what it meant to be a Republican, what it meant to be the Democrat. And so I found a nonpartisan site and I said, this is what this site says and this is platform positions. And I'm not taking a stance either way, but they were all very much aware of my political leanings, it's difficult not to, when I had a button and a pant suit on a lot of days. So ultimately, what I came to realize that I found interesting about the Republican Party, and it's difficult for me to say I appreciate it, but what I find interesting. And I'm going to use the phrase that one of my students came up with. And he said that for a lot of people, the Democratic Party feels too much and thinks too little. And for a lot of people, the Republican Party thinks too much and feels too little. The thing that I can say I find interesting is the notion that there is a party that feels and a party that thinks when we should be all working to be a hybrid of both.

What Shannon and Brad both said kind of plays into my thoughts. It's not a specific thing that I appreciate about the party, it's just that it's there. I think that we need to counterbalance. It strikes me that around half of the population of the United States feels different about things than I do. And I think how can people feel so passionately different about something that I feel passionately for in the other direction? There's something I'm missing. And so I count on the other party to fill that in. Well, it's interesting to me because when you ask the question, I heard someone mumble under their breath and saw them roll their eyes and I think that's really disappointing. So I'm going to try a different approach in answering your question, which is there are things about both parties that I think are dislikable and also likable. I think that part of the problem is people's perception of both parties. So when someone's grumbling under their breath and rolling their eyes that immediately

tells me they don't understand what the party that I'm involved with represents. And so to have a well-informed opinion, you have to first take the step back and stop rolling your eyes. So I think that there are, in principle, both parties lay out things that are of value to the United States of America and the Americans that live here. It's all about how it plays out, the priorities that are set by those parties and by the candidates that are within them. And we also have to remember that there's a spectrum within each of those parties, okay? So it's not one big group thing. And I look at California where I'm from and it's very rare to see a Republican at the state level. Whether it was dominated by Republicans or Democrats, I would say that that's a negative thing because you don't get the push back and rub where compromise is actually a good thing. I think about Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill. And those two couldn't have been more opposite, but at the same time there was some middle ground

there because they could actually have conversations and actually, you know, crack open, you know, a beer afterwards or whatever they drank, you know? I don't know. I just think that that's a very important thing. And as far as, you know, this stereotype of Republicans and corporate America, I'd like to remind everybody here that whether you are a social worker or a volunteer or a CEO, what happens with corporate America has a direct correlation to your life, whether you see it or not. And it can be Shannon's pension. It can be the endowment for the nonprofit that you're volunteering for can be a lot of different things. I just think we need to be very quick about when we make those judgments because if corporate America is not thriving and healthy, my postal worker's pension goes down. The parties have everything you said and they have an organized perception of what they stand for, but how does the average American get to that?

Because the average American is bombarded every day with information again, false news, misinformation. And unless you are willing to put in a lot more time than people have, you're going to end up voting in the end if you vote based on basically the latest 30-second sound bug that scared the hell out of you. We've talked about our happiness, our unhappiness with the candidates and a couple terms I've heard here are compromise and balance. And one of my real concerns is that we're creating political systems that allow candidates to not have to compromise and not have to be balanced. We, a couple of years ago, we got a note from our official in our area and in that note she was bragging about not being willing to compromise and I was amazed at that because I've, that's a quality I really value.

I think it's an essential part of the political process and so I wrote her a note said I couldn't agree more. I think it's important you develop the ability to compromise and be good at that. So, so the idea that we have safe areas where political candidates or our officials can be extreme and don't have to listen to both sides and don't have to develop some sort of a balance and understanding of the big picture to me as a real concern of mine. So the idea of compromise and balance is really important I think. So I think it's great we're all sitting here talking about how we want you know this harmony and you know everybody get along and balance and compromise. So how do you reconcile that with this we must resist thing. How does that get reconciled because you know this all starts not out there. It starts in the seat you're in at the person you look at in the mirror. So you know look I'm all for someone's you know amendment right to go out and protest

and say what they want to say that's part of what makes us an amazing country. That freedom that we talked about earlier that liberty but when you're harming people physically throwing things at them destroying property and saying at all costs we must resist this you know I don't think that that jives with what we're all talking about. And so it all starts with you so when you go home and you're talking to your friends about today or you're calling someone or going out to dinner or you're getting on Facebook or whatever that is you know we've got a women's march today you know I don't necessarily agree with it I don't see what their point is but I do agree with their fact that they have the opportunity and the right to do it okay. What I don't agree with is being obstructionist whether you're a Republican Democrat or independent because that accomplishes nothing and I think everybody here needs to ask that of themselves as well. But today I had planned to go to the women's march that was my plan but it became an obvious

choice for me because I think this to me is where the difference will be made but I have to say my sisters that are marching today because this is recorded obviously Saturday for a Sunday airing but I support them. I don't share every single complaint that every one of those women have I don't. I'm a white privileged woman I'm very fortunate but I support their right to do so. I know people that could potentially be harmed by some of the policies espoused rightly or wrongly and I also feel as if I owe it to the women before me who marched so that I can vote and I can make my voice heard because while my candidate did not win my candidate had a lot of votes and a lot of people supported her.

So I feel to me that that's a valid way of responding to this. I don't support people looting I don't support people breaking down walls and of course I don't. Again I hate that the media even put that out there because I keep seeing the same footage over and over. I'm sure it's happened more than one place but I keep seeing the same thing but I just have to say that there are lots of women like me that are at that march today and we are we're not there to just put a big ol' wrinkle in the system or is there just to say I'm here and my vote didn't count and yeah that's the way the rules were and that's how the system goes and I'm accepting it by gum I can march. So as a nation what do you all think that we should be talking about now that we're not talking about? I think that we all need to take a deep breath and I'm going to go back to what I said early on.

We are Americans we love this country we all want good things for it. You have to start with yourself and if you're going to be close-minded and not be understanding of the people around you and if you're not going to be interested in compromising and only focused on resistance and getting your next person in so that you can shut down the opposition you are helping contribute to the problem so there has to be personal ownership because just like politics starts local with the farm team so does all of this. I think the conversation that we're having that we're not having that we need to have is the whole issue of intolerance and what that looks like. We heard about tolerance a lot but what I the way I experienced that conversation is that oftentimes the issue of tolerance is used to beat down opponents who you perceive as intolerant you know intolerance in the face of perceived intolerance on someone else is still intolerance. What does real tolerance look like? I'm tired of the issue of tolerance being used to beat down other people when they're

perceived to be intolerant. That to me is just another form of intolerance does that make sense? I think that citizens and politicians need to work hard to find common ground with their opponents in a respectful way work on compromise, get government to work, example mentioned before about Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan. We need to elect more moderates at the national level and I'm cautiously optimistic that at the Kansas level we have moderate Republicans and I think of Bob Dole and Dwight D.I.'s an hour as people who help do some good things the interstate highway system and keeping social security going. At the heart of all of this is education. We need to educate our students and ourselves in these seats as Rochelle stated earlier. We need to educate ourselves about these issues. We need to educate ourselves about language and why it matters because words matter.

The briar and bramble of the world in which we live requires us to be careful of ourselves and of others and so ultimately all of this is about being, and I think I'll return to a point George made earlier, being informed and being rightly informed, not just righteously so. Here the word gridlock very often we our government doesn't seem to be able to get anything done for gridlock and two of our panelists have already mentioned the word and that is compromise. Both parties in my estimation have lost the meaning of the word compromise and until we are able to get back in the business of doing some compromising I think will continue to see gridlock. So that is the big concern that I have and one other thing I think about it may be a little bit far out but anyway I think somewhere there may be a place for a third party.

What I would do I take the conservative democrats, the independence and the modern republicans and that would be the third party and I'd call them the American Patriot Party. You asked what we thought we should be talking about and until yesterday I had one thought and today I have another I realized after watching the inauguration that for me and this is personal I'm not saying it should be for anybody else I need to take a beat. I need to just step back I need to take a breath and I really I feel really raw right now and I need to just get things together so I'm not reactionary you know I need to just think about it I think maybe in three months I'll be ready to have conversations more and it's not that I don't want to hear what people have to say it's not that I disagree with them I'm just not ready you know I haven't dealt I realized yesterday I haven't dealt with it.

I think these conversations that we're having today are critical not everybody's going to have these that's very true there's not a great forum for these maybe we should think about that maybe KPR should host something on a more regular basis I'm not that joking I think these are important I think it's only when we can come together in smaller groups and really talk that really anything can happen I don't I don't have one thing that I think has to happen I think there's a multitude of things my goodness the list is long but I think it starts by opening ourselves up making ourselves vulnerable listening to things that we're not totally comfortable with I mean it it's hard to hear someone say they can't find anything positive about my party I I get that I might feel the same way about yours I'm not going to say it out loud you know what I'm saying I just mean it's it's hard to hear those things because as we talked about earlier we hold these things so so close

to us for all of us it seems very important but I think unless we're able to drop all that and just say hey we may not agree but we can agree about something where do we start and and that to me has to be done on this kind of small local one-on-one or ten-on-one level we have to keep talking a big thank you to our Kansas voters who came together this inauguration weekend and did keep talking Bill Brad Carl Doug dice George Jackie Rochelle Shannon and Susan thanks also to Jennifer Wilding of Consensus KC for guiding us through this conversation if you have comments or thoughts about today's KPR presents you can leave them on KPR's Facebook page or email me at kmacentire at keu.edu engineering and production assistance for today's program was provided by KPR's Chuck Smith and Cameron McGoo I'm K Macentire KPR presents is a production

of Kansas Public Radio at the University of Kansas.