www.montereycountynow.com november 7-13, 2024 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY 15 After so much anticipation leading up to Election Day, it might feel like it’s time to take a breath. But even as I write this, before polls close, I realize the real work is ahead of us. Roughly half of us will feel like winners, and half like losers. The result won’t heal a divided country—in fact, it may leave many people feeling disenfranchised. I sat down with Beryl Levinger to ask where we go from here. “You can’t do repair without reconciliation,” she says. Levinger has a lengthy career in the practices of reconciliation and repair. She is a professor emerita at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, where she taught international development for decades. That work took her to more than 50 countries, including Rwanda and South Africa and Colombia. Four years ago, she turned her focus toward her own country when she began working for Root Change, a Washington, D.C.-based group seeking to strengthen democracy and civil society. Clients include the Carter Center, which has long been interested in safeguarding elections, with an initiative to train election monitors worldwide. “It wasn’t long ago they decided that work was relevant to our country,” Levinger says. “The international work informs the domestic work. In the past, it used to be the other way around—it used to be that our experience, we would try to export to the rest of the world.” What experiences, then, might Americans import from elsewhere? How can we cross the divide to engage with people with whom we disagree? A spoiler alert is that Levinger does not know the answer. But she does have some insights, drawn from her decades of experience. “Information is not the path,” Levinger says. “Empathy and listening is better than debunking.” That’s not to say facts don’t help, but they help most when they are delivered by trusted messengers—neighbors or faith leaders or news outlets that already have earned trust. Imagine, say, Fox News delivering the message that our election system has integrity and should be trusted—it would be a game-changer. “It may not be trustworthy but they are trusted, which is an important distinction,” Levinger adds. The “trusted messenger” approach was widely applied to public health during the Covid19 pandemic, quite successfully. Community health workers— trusted messengers—were trained by experts, and then disseminated information to their communities. “The idea is we are not delivering information. We are delivering support to people who might be delivering information,” Levinger says. The metaphor to public health extends only so far though—who are the trusted messengers in politics? A 2023 paper published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, titled “Polarization, Democracy, and Political Violence in the United States: What the Research Says,” notes an underlying transformation in how we perceive these issues, a “scholarly shift from thinking of polarization as an ideological, policy-based phenomenon to an issue of emotion, as well as the emerging understanding of polarization as both a social phenomenon and a political strategy.” How we begin to reconcile with each other, and how people begin to reconcile with institutions and systems they feel betrayed by, is an important and necessary step. But there is also a political solution to part of this political problem. And that solution is ranked choice voting. This practice gives voters the ability to list candidates in order of preference, instead of choosing one—and by design, means the candidate who appeals to the most people, rather than to either extreme, stands to win. “What’s the smallest thing we can do today that would make the biggest difference?” Levinger says. “Truth and reconciliation commissions, or whatever the American branding of that would be, would take a long time to make a big difference. For rankedchoice voting, there is a kind of a critical mass right now. If we want a political solution, ranked choice voting is the political solution.” Of course, that is also a big undertaking and will take some time. There is another option, available to all of us. “Listening, not hearing—it does move the needle,” Levinger says. Sara Rubin is the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at sara@montereycountynow.com. Across the Great Divide Election Day is just a starting point. Where do we go from here? By Sara Rubin Name Calling…Leading up to Election Day, Squid couldn’t keep Squid’s tentacles off social media. The anticipation was everywhere, with politicians and voters weighing in, voicing their endorsements—and, sometimes, calling each other names. The Salinas Valley Democratic Club endorsed two out of three candidates for Salinas mayor, Dennis Donohue and Ernesto González García. Affordable housing advocate Matt Huerta jumped on the dual endorsement, posting on Facebook: “Looks a lot like trying to intentionally split the LatinX vote?! Prove to me I’m wrong?” He got an answer, but perhaps not the answer he was expecting. County Supervisor Luis Alejo, a member of the SVDC, responded: “Maybe because both are club members, burro! Both are good candidates too!! Why you worried?!!” Squid double-checked Squid’s Spanish-English dictionary to confirm yes, burro means donkey—it’s also Mexican slang to call someone dumb, similar to “jackass.” Alejo wasn’t done. “Instead of whining, go walk for your candidates. Stop making silly excuses! You sound like Trump and sounds like you’re scurred too.” Squid’s all for vigorous debate, IRL and on social media, but calling people animal names is definitely not in Squid’s etiquette book. Fired Up…There are also odd things arriving in Squid’s snail-mailbox during election season. Amid that heap, one recent mailer sent out to thousands of Seaside residents caught Squid’s attention. It advocated for a “yes” vote on Seaside’s Measure CC, which would ban the sale of so-called “safe and sane” fireworks. Problem is, there’s no registered number from the state Fair Political Practices Commission on the mailer, which just reads “Paid for by Seaside Residents.” Squid’s colleague found out who was behind the mailer, Seaside resident Tim Duran, who says he’s spent around $10,000, maybe more, in the past year in an effort to battle the illegal fireworks. That included a series of mailers, hiring a private investigator on July 4, and contributing to the official Yes on CC campaign committee. After moving here with his wife in 2012, Duran, a Vietnam veteran, says about the fireworks going off year-round by his house in the middle of the night, “It’s driving my wife crazy, it’s driving me crazy.” He believes some sort of organized crime is involved with smuggling illegal fireworks into the city, even though they merely need to be driven across the stateline from Nevada, where they are legal. As to whether Duran’s mailers are legal, Squid’s pretty sure they are not—any independent committee expenditures of more than $1,000 related to a ballot measure (in this case, by “Seaside Residents”) must be reported to the FPPC. Squid will have popcorn ready to see how it all shakes out. the local spin SQUID FRY THE MISSION OF MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY IS TO INSPIRE INDEPENDENT THINKING AND CONSCIOUS ACTION, ETC. “Empathy is better than debunking.” Send Squid a tip: squid@montereycountynow.com
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