The day of the midterm elections in the United States, I was reading a book that seemed the furthest thing from American politics. The story of how a man domesticated a wild mustang, after all, stirs the thought to contemplation of wide-open vistas and cowboy chaps, not control of the Senate. Yet as I read, one thought kept recurring to me: This is about more than horses.
“Shy Boy: The Horse That Came in from the Wild” is essentially a plea. Author Monty Roberts has spent his life trying to convince anyone who will listen that the old way of training horses – coercion and fear – is cruel and ineffective. His book shows how he taught a wild horse to take a saddle and rider in a few days solely by understanding its view of the world and working with it.
There’s a parable in that, I think. Yes, humans are not horses. But what is the model of action we often see in politics today? I would argue that it is not many degrees removed from the old-school ways of breaking a horse. When we can’t persuade others of our view, politics can become not an open hand, but a whip.
In some cases, this is…
