“It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you place the blame"

                        attributed to Oscar Wilde

Are you a Glenn Beck American or a Michael Moore American? We seem to have become a country polarized between these two positions.  At least, you may believe that if you listen to talk radio on either the left or the right of the political spectrum.

The October 2nd, 2009 New York Times carries commentary about both men. Reading the opinions of columnists David Brooks and Judith Warner reminds me that conflicts don’t get resolved on the edges, they get resolved in the middle where common ground resides. Or, as the poet Robert Frost suggested, “We dance around in a ring and suppose. But the secret sits in the middle and knows” (The Secret Sits, from “A Witness Tree”, 1942).

David Brooks writes that, for all their media attention and supposed power, when you look at the facts, Beck, Limbaugh and Hannity had little effect on the 2008 election results.

As Brooks writes in his column, “The Wizard of Beck,” "despite the fervor of the great microphone giants, the Thompson campaign flops like a fish. Despite the schoolgirl delight from the radio studios, the Romney campaign under performs. Meanwhile, Huckabee surges. Limbaugh attacks him, but social conservatives flock. Along comes New Hampshire and McCain wins!”

And, of course, McCain won the Republican nomination although not the election which Obama won despite the vitriol from the “microphone giants.”

Judith Warner writes about Michael Moore (“The Shame Game”) and contrasts him with “Molly Melching, the founder and executive director of the nongovernmental organization Tostan, which works to teach human rights and democracy and has helped more than 4,000 communities in Africa end the traditional cutting of girls” (notice that Melching doesn’t use the emotionally charged words “genital mutilation”).

According to Warner, “the secret to her (Melching) group’s success lay in the fact that she had learned, through years of trial and error, that to reach people you had to meet them where they were. Respect them. Acknowledge their social norms, beliefs and practices. Find common ground (emphasis mine). Build on shared human aspirations — for safety, for dignity, for a better life for one’s children — then discover how those shared aspirations might reasonably translate into ending practices that cause suffering.”

It is true that this is the reality in some conflicts:

_________________You

_________________Others

The lines don't intersect. There’s no common ground. If this is the case, there’s no basis for negotiation. It’s the classic “take it or leave it” impasse in which the most powerful person “wins.” And, of course, in some cases, the use of power is the appropriate strategy.

However, this is the reality in most conflicts:

____________________  and   ________________    __________________

You/Others                                        You                         Others

There are differences of course. That’s why the conflict exists in the first place.

But there’s also a great deal in common. One key to conflict resolution is to find common ground before negotiating differences. When we listen to each other, we may actually find that we share a common planet, a common desire for peace and a common humanity. Not a bad place from which to begin negotiating.

So while there may be Glenn Beck Americans and Michael Moore Americans, conflicts will be resolved through the realization that we’re all just… Americans.

QUESTIONS? COMMENTS? LJBARKAN@THEPIVOTALFACTOR.COM

Permission to reproduce is granted as long as the following citation is included:

Reprinted by permission of the author, Larry Barkan: http://www.conflictresolutiontraining.net