By: Jeff Arnold
Congressman Jim McGovern’s visit to WHS was supposed to be one of the best events of the year. Not only would students get to hear from a Washington politician, but they would get to interact with him as well. Unfortunately, regardless of political bias or affiliation, the visit was nothing short of disappointing and a letdown.
In a Q&A session that was supposed to showcase both WHS’s students’ abilities to form competent questions and a real-life Congressman showing how he tackles issues that we feel are important in our daily lives, it only did the former. The questions that were asked were interesting and often forced answers of more than a simple yes or no; yet, the responses did little more than give a list of facts and a brief history on the related topic.
In other words, if the goal of the presentation was to increase our interest in, for example, the McGovern-Dole International Food for Education Program (which has no pertinence to Massachusetts residents), we could have saved time by doing a quick Google search. So, instead of gaining any real perspective on what a local politician is doing to help make Massachusetts residences’ lives better, we instead witnessed a politician state easily-available facts and give broad-reaching solutions with no-feasible plan to solve the mentioned problems.
The most blatant example came in the form of his opinion on what to do in Syria to stop the spread of radical Islamic terrorism. To paraphrase Congressman McGovern: fighting is not a viable solution and the only way to affect real change will come in the form of political reform. However, he did not provide any details on to how this solution would be accomplished. He talked about the evils of mass-bombings from both terrorist groups and the US, France, and Russia, but he did not give any alternative courses of action.
In a way it was everything that should be expected from a politician. He danced around questions and gave mundane answers without saying anything of substance. I suppose that this should be expected in a scheduled visit to a high school. There is a fine line between sharing one’s goals and platform and alienating every non-party member in the audience. As a politician, one would want to push their agenda while also not coming off as completely biased. Congressman McGovern chose to take the safest, and consequently, least interesting route by educating us about practically none of his agenda and giving few opinions. Yes, there were instances where he made interesting points (most notably about the issue of running a campaign on the basis of no compromise), but the vast majority of the talk contained rehearsed soundbites that did little to increase our understanding of politics in modern America. Although I commend the people who took part in bringing a Congressman to our school, this should be viewed as no more than a publicity stunt.
