Honest Brokers Needed

North Carolina’s future isn’t bright unless we can figure out how to resolve the growing partisan, polarized and pessimistic mood in our state. It is frightening to watch this paralysis that points fingers and turns friends, sectors, sexes and classes against each other. Unless we change our current posture, this condition threatens to undo much of the progress our state has made in the past half century.

Throughout North Carolina’s history we have always had people of goodwill who strived for the common good, even though they might have had differences in how to accomplish that good. Somehow we have always been able to reach consensus and take steps forward. But we now live in a climate where compromise is such a distasteful concept many gag just saying the word. This arrogance of power is evidenced by one side cramming their agenda through without seeming to care about the common good. Whatever happened to the idea of finding win-win solutions? Instead of win-win we have adopted an I-win, you lose mentality that has taken us down the slippery slope of mean-spirited, uncivil, suspicious and distrustful contempt and anyone who doesn’t agree on every point becomes an enemy on all.

Don’t count this as ignorance. We live in a time when there is more information available than ever before in history, but fewer are willing to engage in or listen to both sides of issues, opting instead to self-select those cable networks, news voices, print sources or Internet sites we choose to visit. This use of media encourages partisanship instead of honest debate and in the case of the Internet, information is often not authentic. Choose an issue - education, transportation, infrastructure, healthcare or economic development and you quickly discover the depth of the fracture in our state. In a time when we need the best and brightest minds working together to solve large problems we have resorted to partisanship on all sides. Unless we change this approach we will not progress as a state.

Already the nastiness has begun in the 2012 elections, where it is obvious candidates and those mysterious Super Pacs don’t want to discuss issues but rather would spend their money and energy trying to frame their opponents. Sadly, the electorate has tacitly approved this behavior by voting for the candidate that spends the most money and slings the most mud. How long can this state, this republic continue with this type of conduct?

What we need now is statesmen, men and women who can bring factions together for honest and civil discussion, who can use their influence to help find common ground upon which we can agree and the impetus we need to move forward, even if only in small steps. No doubt these solutions will require give and take, much as has always been the case.

It is time to learn whether these various ideological factions would rather fight than find solutions. If fighting is their choice the public has a right to know it, because at the end of the day the court of public opinion is the one that counts most. The public is tired of the finger pointing, name calling and mean-spirited fighting and ready to see some positive action coming from those who claim to represent us. Honest brokers are needed.