Limerick: A lack of nuance in today’s political scene
Original article can be found at The Denver Post
Originally published on April 15, 2016 By Patty Limerick
As the madcap exercise called “the presidential campaign” lurches along, a vexing question haunts me: How, in the wild political scene of 2016, can young people retain a positive opinion of their elders?
In other words, is it time for baby boomers to offer a collective apology for our failure to direct democratic self-governance toward the resolution — rather than the escalation — of the nation’s problems?
Starting college in 1968, I could not have been better positioned to participate in a famously friction-filled era of intergenerational interaction.
On one occasion, I left a protest, headed to the college cafeteria, and ended up at a lunch table with a middle-aged political science professor. I decided to regale him with a comprehensive inventory of the reprehensible failings of his generation. While he tried to eat his lunch with some degree of digestive tranquility, I lamented the hesitation and even hypocrisy with which, I believed, many people of his age had responded to the civil rights movement. I then moved on to bemoan their collusion with an unjust and unnecessary war in Southeast Asia.
Nuance did not figure in these remarks.
If turnabout is fair play, I should now be slinking around campus, trying not to land on the receiving end of the sort of harangue I delivered to that benighted professor.
But my own students are not practitioners of the rhetorical style — the self-righteousness, the over-generalization, and the blanket condemnation of one’s elders — that sometimes figured in my expressions as a 17-year-old.
A case in point: I recently went to lunch with Abe Solberg, a student in the Center of the American West Certificate Program, and asked about his response to the current political scene. Abe, it turned out, has watched every presidential debate, Republican and Democrat. At my request, he sent me a written version of what he said at lunch, recording the line of thought that emerged from his immersion in the debates.
“Both sides are guilty of an incredible, almost spectacular, dumbing down of rhetoric,” he writes. “Life is nuanced, and thing are complicated: Why doesn’t our discourse reflect the inherent nuance in life? The debates [are stuck in] the idea that everything is this way or that way; there is no middle ground.”
Abe then strides boldly into that middle ground: “If you’ve only watched the debates, you know that Obama is either the greatest president ever or a man hell-bent on destroying the country. That’s dumb. (There’s no other way to put it.) He’s been a pretty good president, actually, but for all his success he has some notable failings. (Was that so hard to say?)”
And then Abe rallies us to a fresh new cause. “I want to hold a march,” he declares, “for sensible discourse and discussion. We could have signs that said things like, ‘People for Nuance!’ ”
Reading Abe’s statement, the imagination returns to life and delivers a vision: Abe and his fellow millennials joining together with baby boomers in a wondrous protest march, as our voices unite in his innovative demand: “We want nuance! We want nuance, now!” And, as we march, we ask ourselves the obvious question: “How long until Abe can run for president?”