Former U.S. Congressman Jim Matheson spoke in Tuesday's forum, Nov. 17, and encouraged students to engage in the community by staying informed and speaking up online and with officials about public policy.
Matheson said citizens are proud of their country and feel a sense of patriotism, but he's seen polls that say 13 percent of the population approves of Congress's actions. He said he thinks people see and are discouraged by a gridlock that results from extreme polarization and dominates political discussion.
'Words like compromise or consensus or moderate — those are words that are criticized now by the ideologues in our two political parties, criticized by extremes both on the left and the right,' Matheson said. He said there have always been extremes, but it's at the worst of all time now.
The wealth of information online and on TV can turn into sensational clutter, or narrow points of view, that reduce complex issues to radical but provocative, simple, two-dimensional solutions, he said. Those solutions encourage 'polarization and people hearing what they want to hear,' he said.
Matheson said he hopes everyone 'could take a step back and understand that we actually have a lot of common ground in this country' to realize that all democrats don't think one way and all republicans don't think another way.
He said he's not sure polarization is 'helping us be the most informed,' partially because not all the information on the Internet is true. So he encouraged students to change the gridlock of 'simplistic, provocative messages that are dominating the conversation on public policy' by engaging in the political system.
People who currently engage in the political system are the ones who are more passionate and ideological, 'and they have a real disproportionate impact as a result,' he said. 'The more people engage, the more the political process will reflect who we are as a country. It should reflect all of us.'
He said there are three factors that contribute to the gridlock and polarization. The first is political parties' 'single focus is about winning the election' and 'being in the majority. Being in power.'
The second factor is district lines that are drawn to guarantee one party's win for congressional seats, with no competition. 'That's not good for us,' he said. 'I think competition is a sort of fundamental American value. And I think competition is good.'
The last factor that contributes to gridlock is money in politics. The volume of money that comes in and the sophistication of how it's used can be a problem for either party, he said.
He quoted the New York Times' report that in the current presidential election race, 'more than half of all the superpac money has come from just 158 families in our country.' He said he thinks 'it encourages a very polarized, ideological point of view.'
Jim Matheson encouraged students attending Tuesday's forum to inform themselves on issues of public policy and participate in civic engagement. (Natalie Bothwell)
Matheson said people would be shocked at how few people talk to their congresspersons.
He quoted Woody Allen's rule that '80 percent of success in life is showing up.'
But not enough people are showing up, and just 'showing up isn't enough, either,' he said. Eighty percent is a B to college students.
'I think we should shoot for an A,' Matheson said.
However, that requires effort and judgment, according to Matheson. 'That means we need an active and informed engagement' that starts in the home and continues in college, he said.
His father set the tone about staying informed when Matheson was a child through encouraging him to do his homework and be prepared.
'I got interested in the system, I got interested in what it means to be a citizen in this country and public service — I got interested in that because my parents talked about it at the family dinner table,' Matheson said.
Matheson's parents initiated his civic engagement by talking to him about it.
'They talked about that value. They told me how important that was. I learned it, I've lived it, I believe it,' he said. 'It's going to take that kind of conversation at all our family dinner tables to encourage this notion of what it truly means to be a citizen of this country.'
Matheson's goal for his speech was 'to spark a discussion — to encourage all of us to think about our shared values of patriotism, community and making the world a better place while we're here,' he said.
That will take a lot of structural and personal changes. But he wanted people to learn and discuss 'how we can engage in a meaningful way to encourage our political system to advance those values and create a system in which we can be proud of the way in which our government performs.'