Civic leaders share ideas on tamping down political polarization in Oregon

What happens when a community is deeply divided, evident in heated school board meetings and public comments made during city council sessions? We’ll hear from three community leaders who all recently participated in a panel on polarization hosted by George Fox University’s Civility Project. They include Kyle Palmer, mayor of Silverton; Ray Keen, president of the Rotary Club of Canby; and Rick Rogers, Mayor of Newberg, on what’s been happening politically in their communities and their efforts to bring people together.

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. What happens if a community becomes so divided that basic aspects of civil society like school board meetings or city council sessions become a challenge, when the fear of politically motivated violence increases? This is what three local leaders in Oregon are thinking about right now. Kyle Palmer is the Mayor of Silverton. Ray Keen is the president of the Rotary Club of Canby and Rick Rogers is the Mayor of Newberg. They are scared about what they’re seeing and they’re hoping to reduce the level of polarization and division in their communities. Last week, they took part in a panel discussion hosted by George Fox University’s Civility Project. They joined me to talk about the way forward. I started by asking Newberg Mayor Rick Rogers, what is motivating him.

Rick Rogers: Well, thank you very much for the question. We have seen quite a bit of divisiveness in our community, in Newberg, over the past few months to a year, and felt that this was something we’d like to follow. We had heard about what Ray had done in Canby and Kyle in Silverton and thought that a conversation might be a moment to heal in the community.

Miller: Heal from what?

Rogers: There’s been a fair amount of divisiveness that started with, or it was most vocal, I guess, with the school board and the firing of the school superintendent and some actions following that, and that really brought it to the attention that we have a very divided community. There was a recall, two recalls that were brought against members of the school board and the vote split 50-48 to not recall people. So it just shows how divided Newberg is at this moment.

Miller: Kyle Palmer, you’ve been the mayor of Silverton for I think six years now. How would you say that it’s changed politically? Especially in terms of the divisiveness that Rick Rogers is talking about?

Kyle Palmer: I would say it’s changed completely, absolutely profoundly in every way. At the beginning of my service as mayor and many times before that, I boasted in the community that we just didn’t experience the kind of political squabbling or divisiveness that would be related to that, or really divisiveness period. It really exploded about the time that I took office or just a little bit after, as in my impression, at least, the federal political squabbling rose to a new level. And so that I felt, I still believe completely that that just moved into the community and has really been how I would characterize almost any issue that’s come before our community since then. And we’ve had a number of things that have caused reason to discuss these things and be divided in public.

Miller: But it seems like what you’re saying is it was even before the pandemic, which was just a gigantic accelerant. But so if I’m right about the six years, so that was starting in 2016 in terms of your reckoning, the election of Donald Trump. You said there’s been a bunch of other issues, pre-pandemic, where they became contentious in a way that they maybe wouldn’t have before. What’s an example?

Palmer: A lot of it was, there were some race issues that came to light that I had previously not seen in our community. There’s no question those were present, but at some point in time they rose to the level that we were seeing them. Homelessness had become a conversation that we didn’t really have before. There was no visible evidence of homelessness in our community at that moment, though we now know there was certainly a population in our community of some nature, they just weren’t really visible and how to aid these people, what to do about homelessness in general and embrace when that came into discussion. Those were probably the first two things that I noticed.

Miller: And when you say race issues, you do mean instances of racism?

Palmer: Yes.

Miller: Okay. And Ray Keen, going to Canby, I’m curious if you see the effects of the kind of divisiveness or polarization that Rick Rogers and Kyle Palmer are talking about, if you see them in in-person interactions in Canby?

Ray Keen: I do regularly continue to see those, we saw them accelerate to a pretty heightened level in the years of the pandemic for sure, but I see those happening in school board meetings, in city council sessions, not just from the average person but also through our leadership that’s on a local level, and in some ways I do think it kind of mimics what we’ve seen in recent years on the national stage, that it has shown up in that way in our town and in those contexts and it’s a little bit, to me the picture is a bit like a bell curve. There are a lot of people who are in the middle who generally have found ways to have a conversation with each other that is fruitful and productive. But there are some folks at the end of the bell curve who have megaphones and they are shouting at each other across all of us who maybe find ourselves in the middle a little bit more.

Miller: Do you get the sense that political stances themselves have changed dramatically over the last, I don’t know, 1 to 5 years or that the volume of conversations about those existing differences is just higher?

Keen: I think the volume is certainly higher. I would say social media has been an accelerant for these tensions, where in the past you might have had to kind of go to a news source or channel to hear various perspectives distilled down, now anybody with a cell phone in their pocket can proclaim to the world their opinions and ideas. From my perspective, some of that has accelerated the tensions that existed already.

Miller: What have you been doing in Canby to build more trust, to try to push against all of these societal forces that all three of you are talking about? What have you been doing in Canby to get people at least to be able to talk to each other in the same room?

Keen: Well, as I was stepping in as president of the Rotary Club in my town, I realized that rotary has a peacemaking mission and I felt like I wanted to see that take place on a local level, as I was noticing these challenges and so I asked our board to develop a gathering of community leaders, what we would call the Canby Community Summit. And so last October we gathered about 75 leaders from across the community, folks from school board members, City Council members, clergy, business owners, nonprofit leaders. We, for the first time in my town, we tried to gather all those folks for a single night and we had a nice dinner together. We enjoyed Michael Allen Harrison’s music and we talked about the common ground that we share. At the end of that night I gave a short talk just about the importance of finding that common ground and finding ways to communicate with each other, because in our community, we have problems to solve. We’ve got major things to work through and those solutions are not going to come from a single person. They have to come through a collaborative process, they’re complex problems. They require multifaceted solutions, that means we need many voices at the table and sometimes those voices are at the opposite ends of the political spectrum. For us, it wasn’t a desire to try to squash all conflict because we knew that wasn’t gonna happen, but for us it was the beginning, it was a first step.

Miller: What has come from that that feels real and meaningful?

Keen: Well, I think, opportunities. Three times now, I’ve been asked to share that same message. Chamber of Commerce meetings, at the Canby Fire District, at the Kiwanis Club of Canby. So other leaders are interested in again, I think it’s many of those folks who are in the middle of the bell curve who feel like they want to have dialogue on how we address challenges and how we come together. Often times those folks just need to have a space to have a voice and to feel okay about talking again. So sometimes it’s just giving voice to those folks who are a little bit in the middle and may have been quiet for the last couple of years because of the tensions. It’s time for those folks from my perspective to speak up and say that we, we desire and to some degree we expect respectful communication among our leaders and in these, in these sort of sessions, it’s important that that respect be maintained.

Miller: Rick Rogers, I’m curious who you most want to focus on because as we’ve just been hearing from Ray Keen in Canby, it seems like the focus there is maybe the relatively quiet middle as opposed to the shouting ends of the spectrum. Who are you focusing on right now? Who do you most want to reach?

Rogers: I think as Ray said earlier, either end of the bell curve are gonna probably be difficult to reach. But I think I agree that there is a quiet middle, that we really need to reach. I think there’s people, I’ve heard it multiple times where people say that there’s not a political party right now for me, or I can’t align myself with either. We’ve heard, as mentioned before, that there used to be something here called an Oregon Republican, right, with Hatfield and the like and we don’t see that anymore. But yet I think many people would fall into that kind of a belief. So really we’re trying to greet the people that are willing to converse. Those that are gonna throw fire bombs, are going to be Facebook warriors, honestly are gonna probably be difficult to reach. I welcome them if they would like to attend and, and have a civil conversation, but I think we are really attempting to reach people that are tired of the divisiveness, that we’d like to work together to solve some of the issues that we face and to really make Newberg the welcoming place that I believe it to be.

Miller: Ron Mock is the Civility Project Director at George Fox, he has been a part of this. He moderated your event last week. He has said this, “We need the entire range of political views to be heard if we want to do the best job of solving problems, meeting needs, doing justice and respecting every person’s rights.”  But Rick Rogers, what if the view is one that specifically does not respect someone’s rights? I guess I’m wondering what you see as the limits of let’s let every voice be heard and calmly listen to them?

Rogers: My basic bottom line and I think it would hold to this, in this type of conversation as well, is that if the conversation or what we do is not welcoming, then honestly, I don’t want any part of it and, and I hope people understand that, that it is important to be welcoming to all beliefs and and we need to be respectful.

Miller: I mean the reason I bring this up, just to be explicit about it, is that at the heart of the Newberg schools conversation, obviously, was at first that the ban on Black Lives Matter signs or Pride flags and so I’m just, I’m trying to figure out how the ‘let’s come together, let’s talk’, how you see that in the context of someone feeling that their essential humanity is being undermined.

Rogers: Well, and again, that is the challenge, I think, but again, that comes to the notion of, we need to respect each other, we need to respect each other’s beliefs, and some of it may and we’ve started to do this in our, in our smaller conversations, is even storytelling. I’ve said it many times. I didn’t, I didn’t grow up black, brown or gay in Newberg, so because of that, I cannot be an authority on those subjects, but I believe we want to listen to people that did have that life experience. And I think that that view needs to be respected and can’t come from someone like me, a 62 year old white man.

Miller: I just wanna remind folks, I’m talking right now with Rick Rogers, the Mayor of Newberg, Ray Keen, President of the Rotary Club of Canby and Kyle Palmer, the Mayor of Silverton. Last week, they were three of the people who took part in a public conversation to build a sense of civility and to reduce a sense of divisiveness in their three communities. Ray Keen, to go back to you, how challenging is it to push against the national tide that you talked about earlier because obviously everything here, there are particulars in each of your three cities, but we’re not really talking solely about your individual communities. We’re talking about national changes.

Keen: I feel like what has changed a little bit in the last few years is the increase in hostility in our country. And so, when you think of anger, a person’s natural response to circumstances they don’t appreciate or enjoy, they’re having a bad experience. Anger is just a human reaction where our blood pressure goes up. We might breathe a little shorter, that’s very normal. That comes and goes for all of us in a given week or month. But hostility, anger, is that sense of being ready for a fight, in a sense, it’s our bodies preparing for that. But hostility is being ready for a fight all the time. And what I believe we’ve seen on the national level and on the local level is there is an increase in the number of people who are walking around essentially angry all the time. But what’s important for people in the middle to understand is that hostility is the precursor to violence. What we saw on January 6, what we saw in Portland at times in the last couple of years, those, those sort of acts of violence come from a place of people living in extended hostility. And so I just believe it’s really important that people be informed of what the potential is in terms of sort of worst case scenario. When peace is gone, that’s when we really miss it. Right now, we’ve enjoyed a generally relative term of peace. But when peace is gone, that’s the time when you notice, wow, we had something special there.

Miller: Kyle Palmer, if nothing changes or even if the level of polarization and divisiveness you’re all talking about, if it gets worse, what do you see as our future?

Palmer: Well, if that is the case, I see a very bleak future. I’m very concerned now and I would be more concerned then, but at least locally, I just can’t accept that outcome and we’ll do everything to stop that from being the case. And if that means going through 15, 20 different things to find the thing that works, it’s worth the effort. I don’t think this can be solved from the national level down. If we can focus on the middle, those people who already believe what we believe and get them to speak up. But also some of the people who maybe aren’t emphatically in the middle, but aren’t emphatically hostile either and are just hearing some things that resonate to them from one side or the other. If we can get their attention and get them into this side of thought and back to decency and civility and isolate those people who are being hostile. Eventually, I think the critical mass becomes decent and civil and those people start to feel less and less embraced by people of their own type and they start going away or at least becoming quieter. And I think that’s, I don’t know any other way to solve this, but if it gets worse, there’s been times where I thought we were very close to civil war, that just one little thing, one spark in the wrong place, one person doing the wrong thing could ignite that in a way that is very, very challenging to reverse.

Miller: Kyle Palmer, Ray Keen and Rick Rogers, thank you.

Palmer: Thank you.

Rogers: Thanks.

Keen: Thank you.

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