I don't know if anyone else noticed it, but most of this year's MSE Symposium offered no realistic solutions. Sure, they offered courses of action. Ann Coulter said America should send people not matching a white paint chip home and the liberals who protest to Gitmo.
Michael Moore, in his film Bowling for Columbine, offers that by eliminating fear and capitalism we can be a happy nation, just like Canada. Patch Adams sees the very idea of money for medical care as an affront to humanity.
Seems so simple -- all the United States has to do is become fascist or socialist, and it'll be paradise. It's so easy that it makes one's partisan heart tingle with ecstasy.
Back in reality, where people have self-interest and bigotry is wrong, it's time to reach solutions. The endless shouting -- left versus the right, for versus against and extreme versus extreme -- steadily drowns out any compromise and progress -- and puts those words in danger of becoming extinct.
On campus, the foremost example is obviously MSE, with its overflowing crowds for speakers who cannot be said to stand in the mainstream and whose ideas are dead on arrival to real life.
"Patch" Adams, Ann Coulter, John Stossel, Michael Moore, Patricia Ireland all thrive as extremists preaching to their niche audiences -- and making everyone else angry.
Besides MSE, other political groups on campus resort to this presenting of extremes.
For example, All Politics is Local, in its forum on the death penalty, gave us an anti-death penalty activist, an anti-death penalty politician, a pro-death penalty columnist and a pro-death penalty prosecutor.
What did they do for a couple of hours? Argue. What did we learn? That the participants disagree about the death penalty.
The decidedly left-wing audience didn't help much; instead of probing the panel, they just started shouting matches with the pro-penalty panelists.
The discussion should have provided guidance and knowledge to help find solutions. Instead, the entire menu consisted of rich food for the partisan soul.
Beyond Hopkins, the idea of a partisan banquet describes exactly what Americans choose to watch on television -- our national escape, where modern culture goes to see what we'd like reality to be.
What passes for news and information? Rush Limbaugh -- when he's not in rehab -- anchors the number one rated radio show. Fox News Channel, with its shrill Bill O'Reilly noise-fests, ranks as the number one cable news network. CNN simply features ideology stand-ins on its news programs, not to mention Crossfire.
Entertainment programming reflects this my way or the highway mentality as well.
According to the New York Times, the three top-rated cable shows were two NFL games and WWF Raw Zone -- where resolution comes not from compromise, but total victory. College football also made the top 10. Six of the top 10 broadcast shows -- CSI, CSI: Miami, Law and Order, the baseball playoffs and Survivor -- followed the same pattern of picking sides and not allowing compromise. One of those, Survivor, outdoes the rest: compromise becomes just another tool to break enemies and betray friends.
This reflects an argument-driven public discourse: where shouting in public masks a need for action.
This takes place all across our country. Broadcasters and interest groups present their extremes as the only solutions.
It's creating a culture best described as America the polarized: most issues aren't discussed, they're argued by sides that are as far apart as the Earth's poles.
The result is what every poll is saying: America's electorate has grown more partisan and more divided. George W. Bush has already taken advantage of the anti-left energy feeding his base to create a highly-unified party.
Many younger Democrats crave a leader who can do the same. They're tired of watching their own party implode in a cascade of infighting. The more a leader burnishes fire and brimstone, the better their chances for 2004.
Howard Dean's success has come in part because he's playing to that role, providing the ideological left with the same mojo that Bush seems to bring to the ideological right. His reward is the same blind fervor among his followers that Bush has among many on the right.
Where does this leave the silent majority crying out for jobs and solutions?
Nowhere. Our ever-polarizing society leaves no one behind, forcing everyone to take a side and start shouting.
Raphael Schweber Koren is a senior political science and computer science major from Takoma Park, Md.
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