Something about being the middle child, you learn to absorb and balance out emotions. Often they are not your own.
Something about growing up during the Vietnam war, as a middle child, you learn to hate conflict. Not just in a faraway rice paddy, but around the dinner table. Those political arguments left their scars on my family of origin — the Whartons.
Four decades later, my brother and sister and I still do not see the world through the same lens. That is hardly surprising. She did health care. He taught economics. I worked in a corporation. She was rural west coast, I was DC suburbs. He wears Birks. I color my hair. Her’s is a beautiful gray. She married a Jewish man, I a Christian. Our brother is single.
So what if we’re different? Life’s better for it. We’ve listened to and learned from each other. Been humbled a bit. In all things charity.
Hard work? Yes, definitely. Fun? No. But the alternative — further fraying — was not an option. There’s ancestry and legacy to think about. The Thanksgiving table is our annual metric for how we’re doing.
That’s the idea behind Wharton Policy Group, LLC. A table. If families of difference could hang in there, maybe those “habits of the heart” could be uploaded to the policy scale. For example, do we really think there are NO solutions to the health care needs of our nation’s families? Seriously, no solutions at all?
Is there really NO immigration approach we can agree on? Really?
Unmanaged conflict has given way to distrust, making policy solutions even further out of reach.
At Wharton Policy, we see a big blue policy ocean. We don’t shun conflict, but direct the energy of it to useful ends.
With the right tools, people with vastly different viewpoints can do great things. In fact, they do better things and come up with better ideas by starting with what they don’t know, rather than insisting on what they do.
Hard work? Yes. Fun? No. But the alternative — further fraying — is unacceptable.
Let’s get around the table — and get to work.