Life isn't a high school debate

The Virginian-Pilot Sunday Forum, November 30, 2014

Endless debate is becoming the new favorite American pastime; inaction our nation’s worst nightmare.

Scholastic debates are all about taking a position, any position and defending it. Teams get points for doing this with style and poise. Get enough points and your team wins.
 

Public debate—about real issues having real consequences—should be about more than tallying up points. It should also be a search for truth. And the truth shouldn’t be that hard to find.

Two factors make arriving at the truth so difficult.

One is the shear abundance of information out there—some of it good, some of it bad, and much of it misleading. Once something is put out there—even a boldface lie, easily and continually disproven, it lives on forever. It is never going away.

Opposing views in the digital age are not discussed by two people staring each other in the eye trying to make the other one blink. An issue like global warming in today’s heated environment will most likely be argued by two people staring down at their iPhones, pulling facts off the Internet the way two people watching a movie at the cinema might pull popcorn out of a jumbo box.  

Just as the last bites are hardly ever as good as the first ones, most of those facts have been out there so long they are beginning to get stale. Many of them weren’t that good to begin with.

The second factor preventing us from arriving at the truth centers on where the debate is not taking place.

In a democracy, our representatives should make up the debate teams. But all too often, the big issues of the day are being addressed outside of Washington. Issues like immigration reform, global warming, building the economy, defense, health care, and education—are being fought by cable news networks, with an unhealthy dose of viewer tweets as to “what’s trending.”

This is generally self-serving because voters generally tune in to the facts they like from the folks they like getting them from. Our elected officials are listening to this debate, and then waiting for the polls to point them in the winning direction.

It shouldn’t always be about winning but it usually is. This is why true campaign-funding reform faces an uphill battle. The challenge is always to corner the money, never reduce it. This is because while money doesn’t make for better elections, sadly, it still does win elections.

But political victories don’t necessarily lead to solutions. In fact, most of the time they won’t lead to anything. They’ll merely keep the debate alive. Too many of our representatives seem content to simply keep the debate going if it improves their own chances of survival. Not arriving at an end game seems to be their game plan.

Arriving at the truth is difficult but it shouldn’t be impossible. The biggest obstacle to arriving at the truth isn’t that it’s not out there. It’s that no one seems to be looking for it.

Our leaders in Congress are unwilling to lead, electing instead to score points by arguing for the sake of argument. Meanwhile, across the nation their supporters vigorously take positions shaped around often false or misleading information.

Our nation is paralyzed, frozen by the inaction inside the government and misguided action by those living outside the Beltway. In the end, it shouldn’t be about doing what we like to do—debate. It shouldn’t matter what debate team we’re on. It should be about finding the truth and then doing something.