We were sitting in a House Committee hearing room. Michigan leaders were explaining state government to several Chinese university presidents when I decided to tap on my iPad and do a quick email/Facebook check. As my browser reached Facebook.com, a wall leapt onto my screen saying the site was "blocked by the House of Representatives'' web portal. I marveled at this message like a tourist seeing the Great Wall of Chine for the first time. More than 500 million people use Facebook the way older generations use telephones and someone decided to build a wall blocking this 21st century giant? Quoting Scotty from Star Trek, I thought ``How quaint'' and quickly tapped on my iPad's Facebook App, which went right around the wall and took me to the outside world. Joseph Serwach January 16, 2011.

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Bridges Beat Walls
By rgoins (https://domemagazine.com/author/rgoins/) on January 13th, 2011
Columns
Joseph Serwach
Bridges Beat Walls
January 16, 2011
We were sitting in a House Committee hearing room. Michigan leaders were explaining state government to several Chinese university
presidents when I decided to tap on my iPad and do a quick email/Facebook check.
As my browser reached Facebook.com, a wall leapt onto my screen saying the site was “blocked by the House of Representatives” web
portal.
I marveled at this message like a tourist seeing the Great Wall of China for the first time. More than 500 million people use Facebook the
way older generations use telephones and someone decided to build a wall blocking this 21st century giant?
Quoting Scotty from Star Trek IV, I thought “how quaint!’’ and quickly tapped on my iPad’s Facebook App, which went right around the
wall and took me straight to the outside world. As Detroit-born actor George C. Scott notes in Patton, if mountains and oceans can be
overcome, anything built by men can be overcome.
Ever since my earliest reporting days, when executive assistants put up walls trying to keep me from talking to newsmakers, I’ve enjoyed
finding ways around walls. I prefer bridges.
Great stories often serve as bridges that connect people you might not expect to have much in common.
For example, what do Georgia Republican and former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Dearborn Democrat U.S. Rep. John Dingell,
and Detroit City Council President Charles Pugh agree on?
Ordinarily, you’d expect them to be on different sides, trading barbs.
But back in June they seemed to be singing together harmoniously after Gingrich stood on a stage at the 2010 Mackinac Policy
Conference, extemporaneously telling stories about Sonny Bono, Pope John Paul II, Solidarity, China and the lessons they had to offer for
Michigan and Detroit.
What was startling about that talk was my most liberal friends were telling me, “I’ve always hated Gingrich. I always tuned him out, but
he was brilliant.’’ Gingrich the former history professor was connecting to them. My conservative friends who saw or heard the speech,
meanwhile, were, for the first time, seeing Gingrich as a presidential candidate they would want to work for.

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Pugh, calling himself “the farthest thing from a Republican,’’ was praising Gingrich’s ideas. Dingell was calling them “provocative’’ and
said he was considering them. In the past six months, that 45-minute talk, titled “Gingrich to Michigan: Change or Die,’’ has been viewed
more than 11,500 times on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyi5JsYeY6E).
The Detroit Regional Chamber, which invited Gingrich, has followed up on his ideas, particularly the one to “pretend Detroit is Puerto
Rico and make it a tax free zone for 10 years,’’ issuing progress reports (http://mpc2010.detroitchamber.com/scorecard/tax-free) on
where the discussions and studies have gone since June.
For myself, that talk struck a bizarre personal note when Gingrich told the audience “my wife and I are flying to Krakow, Poland on
Sunday.’’ I thought, “WHAT???” because my own wife and I were also flying to Krakow that same Sunday. My buddy said, “maybe you’ll
be on the same flight!’’
Impossible, I thought, but sure enough, when my wife and I boarded a flight from Frankfurt, Germany, to Krakow, we were seated a few
rows apart from Gingrich.
After landing, we spoke as we waited for luggage and soon he was inviting our Alumni Association of the University of Michigan travel
group to the premier of his film Nine Days that Changed the World, the story of how John Paul’s 1979 visit to Poland peacefully yet
powerfully marked the beginning of the collapse of communism.
What did John Paul do to start that avalanche? He spoke the truth. Not spin. Not hyperbole. Simple statements of truth that shook up
and eventually shattered a system that had been in place since World War II.
Gingrich at Mackinac spoke of how Solidarity, inspired by the Pope, defied the communists with posters saying “two plus two equals
four.’’ The communists couldn’t remove the signs without looking foolish, yet the signs defiantly told the world that the people would no
longer accept equations that didn’t add up. Truth and common sense would instead prevail.
When we all know a system is broken, we have to get back to the plain common sense of two plus two equals four, focusing on facts we
all know to be true and building from there.
That simple equation can draw liberals to conservative icon Gingrich. And it can be the basis of political dialogue as the new leaders in
Lansing discuss how to reinvent Michigan.
Much has been written about how polarized Americans have become. In The Big Sort, Bill Bishop describes how less than a quarter of
Americans in 1976 lived in places where the presidential election was a “landslide’’ (where a county was carried by a candidate by more
than 20 percentage points). By 2004, he shows, nearly half of all Americans lived in “landslide counties’’ that went either overwhelmingly
Republican or Democratic.
Capitals like Lansing are places where the two sides come together. How do you get around the walls? By starting the discussions, not
with differences but with the things people need to agree on, like the fundamentals of two plus two.
Joseph J. Serwach, a long-time Michigan journalist, is completing his graduate work at the University of Michigan studying higher
education administration, public policy and business — and the bridges that connect them.
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Very good piece.
Joe Serwach is along time brilliant writer that grabs you right away and writes in a intelligent way and yet people can easily follow.
What he has written is attractive a native born detroiter. Joe seems like a person that could build those bridges that need to be
constructed in Mich. We are lucky to have such a gifted writer and thinker in Detroit today.
OSWDdFknZfMqX February 3, 2014 at 5:22 pm
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