Metro Pulse/Editor's Corner/Tongue Lashing

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The pluses and minuses of polite public dialogue

by Jesse Fox Mayshark

I have an acquaintance whom I guess you'd consider part of the Knoxville establishment, a person of a certain amount of influence and status. I respect his intelligence and commitment to his job and other endeavors, even though I often disagree with him and he with me. A few times in the past year, when I have written something particularly pointed about an individual or entity, this acquaintance has asked me an interesting question: "Do you want to make a point or make a difference?"

The implication, of course, is that while heated rhetoric may be useful for constructing a colorful and entertaining argument, it is less effective in actually changing anything. "Making a point" is often a zero-sum game, a way of assigning blame for some problem to a particular source. "Making a difference" requires a more balanced approach, one that accepts the necessity of compromise and mutual respect as a prerequisite to meaningful progress.

Well...

My answer has always been a little fuzzy. Sometimes I want to make a point. Sometimes I want to make a difference. (Sometimes, I just want to make a drink.) But the question is worth serious consideration.

Knoxville, it seems to me, is at a fascinating and crucial point in its development—culturally, economically and politically. How we proceed from here will be significantly affected by how well we as a community learn to talk and listen to each other. It would be hard to overemphasize the significance of deciding what kinds of conversations we want to have, who we talk with and how we talk with them. This is true for our political and business leaders, for the local media, for educators and advocates and for anyone with a vested interest in Knoxville's future—which is to say, everyone in the community and quite a few people outside it.

Why is dialogue important? As a developer friend of mine (yes, I do have friends who are developers) told me recently, "It's hard to really dislike most people once you sit down and talk to them." Dialogue, if it's conducted reasonably and evenly, builds familiarity, trust and knowledge. For a community as traditionally riven as ours—between city and county interests, the school board and County Commission, whites and blacks, natives and newcomers, silk stockings and overalls, and on and on—honest, open dialogue is a crucial first step toward turning animosity and distrust into cautious collaboration.

Of course, it's much easier to say than do. Our world is shaped and scarred by conflicts that have resisted hundreds and thousands of efforts to bring people to the table. Even in a workplace, it can be hard to get six people to set aside personal grudges and resentments for some common goal. Often, the grievances of individual parties are very real. In Knoxville, the schisms are mostly not marked by bloodstains, but they are still based on longstanding patterns of unfortunate behavior.

And one of the most unfortunate patterns is a resistance to dialogue itself. Over the past few years, I've heard many people in Knoxville government and business circles say something along the lines of, "We talk and talk and talk in this city, and we never do anything." Similar refrains have been used to justify pretty much every iteration of downtown development proposals, up to and including Universe Knoxville: "We talk and talk and plan and plan—sometimes you just have to take action!"

This sounds like a compelling argument, unless you happen to know that it is simply not true. The reality is, most of Knoxville and Knox County's current decision-makers seem terrified of true, open discussion of crucial, complex issues. The model we most often get instead is a single proposal pushed by a small group of people who insist that public officials and the public at large either embrace or reject it (with it always being understood that anyone who rejects it is "negative" and "holding this city back"). Never mind that there may be legitimate questions about the proposal at hand, that there may be other, better ideas, or that there may be ways to simply make the proposal better and stronger by involving more voices and more perspectives.

"We're awfully good at killing things in Knoxville," more than one decision-maker has grumbled to me. I'm not sure that's true either, but if it is, it's only because we are so often presented with things in this community that we either have to accept wholesale—after all the decisions about it have already been made—or reject, with no room for real discussion.

This is where the heated rhetoric comes in. In the absence of a dialogue, it is natural and sometimes necessary to vent frustration in less-than-diplomatic ways. Whatever the drawbacks might be of verbal bomb-throwing, there's no question that it can serve the purpose of getting the attention of people who are otherwise deliberately oblivious. Any reaction at all can be better than being completely ignored. Granted, it can simply serve to build up defensiveness on all sides if people decide to get defensive. But it can also open the way for further, more civil conversation—if, and it's a big if, the assorted parties are mutually willing to pursue it.

I'm a big believer in courtesy and respect. I may be a Yankee, but I was still raised more or less right. But I also believe that sometimes you have to yell a little bit to make your voice heard over the wheels of institutional indifference and insularity, whether they're in the City County Building, the Chamber Partnership or the state Legislature. Sometimes you have to make a point before you have a chance to make a difference.

We need civil dialogue in this city, yes. But we need to have a dialogue first.