At this week's Round Table, Jack, Kenisha, and Madeline spoke with Tedman Getschman, Founder of Common Sense for Uniting America. Ted is anative Nevadan who served as a U.S. Naval officer for 28 years, during which time he was stationed in Japan, Spain, Germany, and the UK. He’s now retired from the military and spends his time spreading the word that there IS a common sense approach to ending political divisions–-so of course we wanted to speak with him! While developing training programs all over the world, from Armenia to Azerbaijan, Ted became excruciatingly aware that there were lots of disjunctions from administration to administration in the U.S., which prevents our country from having and working towards the kind of long range vision that many other countries have (think China) This, combined with the divisiveness of the last two elections, and the all or nothing feeling from people on both sides of the aisle, led him to feel that our government is a beautiful idea but it doesn’t work in practice. He feels there’s a simple issue with the government with a simple fix that would make political division go away. After all, if you think about all the problems we have in our country/world, shouldn’t we ALL be focusing on answers to these challenges, even if we come to the answers through different pathways in life? One key thing Ted feels needs to change is our two party system and plurality voting, which inevitably makes people feel left out, voiceless, and disempowered. It’s not that we don’t and won’t have differences of opinion. We do and we should. It’s that the current system forces people towards extremes. We think you’ll enjoy learning more about Ted and his thoughts in this episode. Thank you for listening!
