Working Together to Solve Big Problems

There’s an encouraging article in the New York Times about loggers and environmentalists putting aside their hostility to save a town. If you are interested, you can try searching for “They Overcame Mutual Loathing, and Saved a Town”, by Nicholas Kristof, written April 10, 2021. Warning: this article might be behind a paywall.

We definitely need more of this kind of collaboration, although the article does stress the difficulty of doing so. It can be really hard to see your “enemy” as having any decency, but we need to be able to do so if we want to solve some intractable problems in the future.

It looks like Joe Biden and the Democrats are willing to listen to the Republicans, but I sense the Republicans are still not serious about putting forth real solutions that won’t get a knee jerk reaction from the Democrats. There is a small group of Republicans, composed of Susan Collins and Mitt Romney, as well as Joe Manchin and others, but their proposals apparently have been so reduced (shall I say timid?) and far from what the Democrats are proposing (basically suggesting a spending at a greatly reduced level than what most economists say we need to do). The small size of their proposals suggest the group is not very serious about working with the Democrats (yes, Joe Manchin is a Democrat, but I don’t think most Democrats would regard him as one – he is an outlier but Democrats do need a contrarian).

Thomas Friedman once wrote an opinion piece about small towns that successfully put aside their Republican/Democrat hostilities and ended up succeeding while towns that continued to have sparring saw their vitality ebb away. He stressed the need to put aside one’s Republican hat and one’s Democrat hat and just sit together and solve the big problems.

We need this type of collaboration throughout all of our towns in America instead of this constant hostility that we have now.