I’ll tell you a story:
Years ago, my husband worked in the drama department at UT. He was walking through the scene shop one day and he observed two students sawing lumber for a piece of scenery. As he watched, bemused, the students laid a 12-foot board across two sawhorses, and one student proceeded to saw the board in half—between the sawhorses. When the pieces collapsed with a crash, the student turned to her partner and said, “Darn! That’s the second time that’s happened!”
Our communities—including our political communities—operate in cycles. It’s vanishingly rare when a policy issue or political conflict is genuinely unique. When we encounter an opportunity or challenge, we do well to consider when a similar situation has manifested, recently or in the past.
For example: legislators in both chambers are filing bills that would draw local government agencies into federal immigration law enforcement, along with other anti-immigrant policy proposals. We’ve been here before. Texas Impact’s YouTube video “Texas Senate Bill 4: Anti-Sanctuary Cities” uses legislative video clips to tell the story of one divisive bill that caused lasting rifts in the Texas Legislature.
It’s not just immigration. Texas Impact’s LegeTV YouTube channel is full of clips from legislative deja vu moments—like a 2016 clip about how the Texas grid prepares for disasters, or this 2010 testimony from then-Health and Human Services Commissioner Tom Suehs about the need to fix Texas’ Medicaid and SNAP eligibility systems.
But merely remembering we’ve been in a similar situation before is no guarantee that we’ll get a better outcome next time.
Our vernacular is larded with admonitions about “burning your hand on the same stove twice” and reminders that if we always do what we’ve always done, we’ll always get what we always got. Most of us learn (eventually) that we can’t deploy the same tactics and expect different results. So why would we think we can fight the same policy fight over and over and get a better resolution?
The way to have a different policy fight is not to learn more facts or yell louder. Instead, we’ll do better to ask different questions and practice a little humility. Consider taking a few minutes to check out some very approachable resources that might give you new ideas about how to approach your advocacy in 2025:
Psyche: “How to Have Better Arguments” (article)
Adam Kahane: “How to Change the Future” (RSA)
Katherine Schulz: “On Being Wrong” (TED Talk)
