How politics shapes our behaviors, creates negative models for children

Kitchen Debate--Nixon and Kruschev

Carol Forsloff—-What’s in and what’s out in terms of what we think, act, and do is often influenced by our local and national politics. Although most people say they shun partisan notions, they end up being influenced by them at the same time, mirroring what they see and hear in the way political leaders interact. One of the biggest potential threats to the culture has to do with how our behaviors serve as negative models for our children and our future as a society.

Presently the United States Congress is deadlocked over the budget and Obama care. Both sides of the debates have often taken a “win at any cost” approach to problem resolution. This strategy, although said to be thought of negatively by the majority of Americans, nevertheless offers to everyone a model for interaction that spills over into other situations where people are divided about a situation or event.

In past eras, political debates shaped our attitudes for many years concerning how we perceived other nations, as well as how we saw ourselves. The Kitchen Debates between former President Richard Nixon and Nikita Kruschev offered a heated exchange between two national leaders on the issues related to communism vs. capitalism. Although the debate became somewhat pronounced in delivery from both Kruschev and Nixon, there was at the same time a gentleman’s agreement that the behavior not escalate out of control. This was the model of behavior for the 1950’s, when appearing proper, while still being political, was part of the social and political behavior at the time. Still Nixon’s pointed arguments about Communism became the perception of most Americans about how that form of government was an unfair system that took away personal freedoms. The lasting effect is the continuing debate over matters like health care as reflecting a Communist style.

Condominium maintenance and management provides an arena for quarrels to take place, especially when there are necessary repairs. Hostilities erupt in much the same manner we see politicians debate, with neither side willing to listen to the other or read anything that disagrees with a point of view held as dear as a political argument.

In a local condominium community in Oregon, the scene of Congress wrangling provides an unintentional pattern of how individuals make decisions about repairs vs. capital improvements on units found by experts to have extensive damage. The community has taken sides, with many individuals apathetic because of the anger and frustration, simply letting others take the responsibility for debate or decision. One side of the community debate includes Board members as well as members of the community who believe the experts who have evaluated the project to be correct in the judgment that repairs, although expensive, have to be done immediately. The other side of the debate represents people opposed to the project, some because they don’t want to spend the money to fix the buildings, some because they don’t have the money to do it and still others because they seek to control the project by controlling the decisions of others. On either side of the arguments about the need to take action, but divided over the process of how to do it, the groups have scarcely changed in attitudes, regardless of evidence presented at meetings or even in court.

In the case of the present arguments over the debt ceiling, what some call entitlements as well as Obamacare, each side has the same intractable approach, where neither side is willing to take action that interrupts their interpretation of the problems and their approach to resolving them. Instead acrimony and division has grown so significantly, that the arguments have spilled over into personal interactions between individuals who were at one time friendly and sociable and are now angry and sometimes abusive in the way they interact with one another.

Those who don’t participate in the political arguments claim one side has as many problems as the other, so they don’t take sides. Similarly the apathetic, disinterested and those wanting to appear agreeable with everyone, sit out the discussions with the notions that each side in the controversy, in this case about a condo community’s needs and financial concerns, has good and bad arguments, so no one can make a decision since they don’t know how to judge the right from the wrong. Even a judge’s decision, given after a trial involving a lawsuit, declaring the major repairs were indeed necessary and not capital improvements as the plaintiff’s faction had claimed, brought no change among the apathetic or the fearful among community members.

Is this pattern widespread or an isolated reflection of what is happening in the rest of the country?
It is more likely than not a way we have learned to interact with each other, modeling what we see, as experts remind us that’s how we learn. The worst of it is our children grow up learning those patterns, so the need to make effective, balanced, and honest resolutions in kind and caring manners becomes even more important when we understand we live what we learn from others. And modeling behavior, as mental health experts declare, has long-lasting effects. In that case, when the worst thing happens, we have only ourselves to blame for not honoring evidence and instead separating into intractable positions that serve only to bring harm to ourselves..