Robert Kahne: I am a lot like Ben Wyatt

The guy to the left is Ben Wyatt (played by Adam Scott), a character from my favorite show on television, Parks and Recreation. (Sorry, Community, I think you’ve been unseated). Ben Wyatt arrived on the show at the end of the second season as a hard hearted Indiana state financial auditor. He arrives in the mythical town of Pawnee in order to clean up the city’s financial mess. During most of his second season appearances, he clashes with the lovely Amy Poehler, who plays my perfect mate–Leslie Knope. However, by the end of the show’s third season, he has lightened up quite a bit, and is dating Leslie.

I am a lot like this guy. The character Ben was elected the mayor of a small town in Minnesota when he was 18 years old, and prompted ran the town’s finances into the ground. After being impeached (two months after he took office), he spent the rest of his professional career trying to clean up his name. He became a financial auditor, and the character has helped turn around several towns financially. However, his past always seems to find a way to haunt him–in an episode in the show, he is consistently hounded by Pawnee’s hilariously ridiculous media for his troubled past as a failed mayor.

I am like Ben because when I was younger, I made a lot of silly mistakes also. I have always been pretty quick to absorb information, and I have always been very passionate about thing in which I believe. In high school and throughout much of college, I wielded my opinions like a big sword. I would argue until me and the other person were blue in the face, and I would never back down. I took to rhetoric pretty quick: while I fought a lot of arguments to a draw, I very rarely looked foolish or incorrect. I was thoroughly convinced that if I argued with people who thought differently than me that they would be converted to the way in which I think, or at least, that the people who saw us arguing would be swain to “my side.” I fought with feeling–and if the other person had the facts which disproved my arguments, I would just continue to repeat my opinions, just louder, and with more feeling. Ideology trumped everything to me–and anything that was right to my ideological faith was gospel. That was a really crappy thing to do. More than several people have taken me aside to tell me that they were offended by how much I hounded someone in a rhetorical tussle, and others found me to be offensive and thought my tone was overly mocking. They were right.

For the past several years, I have tried to make this right. In my last few years of undergraduate, I worked really hard to learn about different political ideologies and economic schools. I have tried to learn and understand their decision making frameworks, and how they think. When deciding to go to graduate school, I decided to go to policy school. There, I worked really hard to learn how to discover facts and utilize information in order to solve problems and draw conclusions. Like Ben Wyatt, after realizing that the way in which I had lived was flawed, I have tried to make things a bit more right.

In real life, however, Amy Poehler is married to this guy. She has made a huge mistake.

That’s not to say I don’t have a lot of opinions, still. But when I do decided to be vocal about them, I am sure to provide evidence or support for the things which I say. That’s super important. And whenever I am writing about something, I try to do my best to explain the other side of the coin. That’s why in this space, I’ve tried to give Austrians arguments to the debt ceiling crisis, and why I have tried to explain every side of the sustainability/consumption chain as completely as possible. I still screw up–a lot. I let my opinions get in the way when I see something that makes me really angry, but usually I recover pretty quickly and before I say TOO many stupid things, I get back to using data and information to back up my thoughts. To the people who are reading this: feel free to call me out about this. If you think I don’t do a good enough job of ensuring that facts and information are ingrained in what I say, write, and post–feel free to speak up! I want to be as good as I can about this, and help is always appreciate (well…help is usually appreciated :))

Plus, Ben Wyatt and I both part our hair in ridiculous ways, and enjoy wearing plaid shirts entirely too much. And we are typically the only people to laugh at our own jokes.