By The Herald Editorial Board
As divided as our politics are now — from the national-level fights over taxes and assistance programs, down to the rallies and protests where signs and ball caps voice our opinions — students at Henry M. Jackson High School this year got to see another side of that exchange that promises to reveal the advantages of finding common ground.
The Building Bridges Project, led by Snohomish County Council members Nate Nehring and Jared Mead, is a nonprofit that seeks to bridge ideological divides through education, community engagement and advocacy. It recently marked the first year of its Future Leaders Academy, which built on the work that Mead and Nehring had already been doing in high school classrooms and college lecture halls and in bringing students to county council sessions.
Expanded lectures and discussions in Jackson’s advanced-placement government classes this year also included a day in Olympia during the state legislative session this spring, where students watched debate, met with lawmakers and officials and witnessed the passage of a resolution they had helped draft.
Last week, the academy’s first year was marked with panel discussions at WSU-Everett.
The summit called on two state lawmakers — Sen. John Lovick, D-Mill Creek, and Sen. Ron Muzzall, R-Oak Harbor — to talk about their working relationship and the exchange that happens among most lawmakers and state officials.
Each has his political beliefs and they work within their caucuses, but getting legislation adopted often requires lawmakers to cross the aisle to seek feedback and votes from members of the other party. And it requires relationships, Muzzall said, relationships that are forged during long days of hearings and meetings, discussion and debate.
“I’m a relationship person. I want to develop a relationship with people, and I have many of them across the aisle,” Muzzall said. Through that relationship, he said, he and Lovick — a former state trooper and sheriff — found a common interest in law enforcement.
“We’re both very passionate about law enforcement and accountability in our community, but that also means we’re both very passionate about holding our law enforcement accountable,” he said.
Each has come to the other seeking support for legislation. Sometimes the answer is yes; sometimes, no.
Bipartisan votes in Olympia are not uncommon, but there are differences over policy.
“We should be working together, talking to each other, seeing where we can find common ground. And at the end of the day, if you disagree on something, don’t be enemies,” Lovick said. “When we disagree on something, we’re not disagreeable.”
Building relationships and listening to others’ perspectives is necessary, even in nonpartisan settings, noted two other panelists: Kadi Bizyayeva, vice chairwomen for the Stillaguamish Tribe and its fisheries director; and Jason Moon, a Mukilteo City Council member.
There are frequent instances, Bizyayeva said, where she sits with community members with a range of priorities and values. In those situations, listening is key.
“It’s important to listen to understand more than you listen to respond,” she said. “It’s incredibly important that we listen to understand where that common ground could be, and then work to understand it and build on that common ground.”
Moon said he’s found that listening and building relationships does take an investment in time. His tip: breaking bread together, whether that’s a cup of coffee or a meal.
“My foundation is faith and family. And if you share a meal with someone that you don’t know, you learn so much,” he said. “Because that can bring on trust, that could bring on more perspective for you and that individual or a group of people, and through that, through that trust, you could build that relationship.”
A second panel included two of the Jackson High School students who participated in the Future Leaders Academy: Alejandro Carbajal and Anja Duechen. Both started by talking about their perspectives on politics before the academy’s classroom discussions and the day in Olympia, describing discouragement and dissapointment with the perceived lack of consensus and common ground.
“Politics and government was just a lot of disagreement and feuds that got people nowhere,” Duechen said.
Seeing the legislature in action, however, how discussions and debate are handled, provided a different perspective.
“It’s not the disagreement and feuds that are portrayed in the media,” Duechen said. “It’s very much just a lot of people working together, even with different opinions, to create action, to take action, even if they are on different sides of a spectrum.”
The leadership Carbajal witnessed and the conduct of lawmakers such as Muzzall and Lovick left an impression.
“They demonstrated what it looked like to interact across political lines, what it meant to be respectful and earnest,” he said. “I really do appreciate the example you’ve given me, and I think it’s a template for how we should approach politics in the future.”
Seeing the possibility of such exchanges provided confidence for Carbajal to apply that in his own relationships. He said he now finds it easier to sit and talk with those with beliefs that might differ from his.
“It’s not just people on the other side, opponents, enemies, or whatever terms are thrown out there, but people who have sincere convictions,” Carbajal said.
Duechen agreed, noting a long friendship with another student and their discussions on political topics in which they disagree. It’s never been a strained relationship, she said, but some topics were avoided.
“It’s probably stronger now that we’ve kind of opened up that part of our relationship, being able to just talk to each other about politics, rather than it kind of being like a polarized topic that we can’t really talk about,” she said.
Both Duechen and Carbajal said they now intend to study political science in college; Duechen at Washington State University, Carbajal at the University of Washington, allowing them to disagree agreeably about who will win the next Apple Cup.
But the intention of the Future Leaders Academy wasn’t meant to recruit budding politicians, but to encourage productive discourse among young adults as they work and live in their communities, giving them the tools to build bridges.
The students’ principal at Jackson, Sechin Tower, praised the Future Leaders Academy and the interest and knowledge about politics that it has fostered in students. Most important, he said, was the insight it provided into turning different perspectives into working agreement.
“To hear them discussing some of these issues, coming up with solutions and ideas that nobody had come up with before and when they disagreed, they knew how to disagree productively,” Tower said. “That’s an incredibly powerful thing that we really need in this day and age.”
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