Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/844209
66 SMT Magazine • July 2017 The Vietnam War was different because we sat in our living rooms in the evenings and we listened to Walter Cronkite give the body count. We saw the horrific scenes coming back from the battlefield of American soldiers being shot, ene - my soldiers being shot, and the carnage that was occurring there. The American people saw war in all of its inhumanity up close and personal, and they didn't just observe it. They engaged in it. They engaged in it and it played out on our college campuses. It played out in the streets of our cities and it changed who America was. It had a cultural, societal-shaping impact here in America. Now, roll the clock forward. About 10 years ago, with the advent of the social me- dia platforms—Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, In- stagram, etc.—and a 24-hour-a-day opinion. I started to say "news cycle," but it's more of an opinion cycle. The American people today are seeing inside of the American political and governing machinery from a perspective that they've never seen before. Goldman: This is true. Johnson: Much like they saw war for the first time during Vietnam, they're now seeing the sausage being made inside the American gov- erning system and they don't like what they see because it's contentious. It's frustrating. It's ag- onizingly painful. It is slow. Sometimes it defies common sense about why you can't move one way or another on a piece of legislation. Now you've got 300+ million people who are now not just observing the American political and governing process, but they're engaging it. Just like they did in the Vietnam War. How are they engaging in it? Well, they're demanding action. They're demanding that things get done. Is that an unreasonable demand? Absolutely not, but I think what we have failed to do as a nation is remember that historically, our system was not designed to move fast. Our system was designed to be debated, to be deliberate, to be slow mov - ing, and I think the testimony to that is the fact that we're over 240 years old and yet we have seen very little change to our Constitution. Look at how many countries throughout the world where the president resigns, they abol- ish the legislature, and they rewrite the consti- tution. America isn't set up like that. We don't have an exit ramp that way, so we have to make the system work that we have because that's the way we were built. It was built as a pass-fail sys- tem and we must work together to pass. The problem comes in because of the instant gratifi- cation environment we've created for ourselves; let's think about it for a second. Today, you don't have to plan what you're going to have for dinner. You don't have buy it. You don't have to prepare it. You don't have to grow it. All you got to do is pull up in front of the marquee at the McDonald's or the Wen- dy's or the Burger King and three minutes lat- er, you've got your meal in a bag, and you've not had to do much of anything except pay for it. You get that instant gratification. Same thing applies when I can order my dog food online and it shows up at my house literally within 24 hours. Everything has got to be right now. So the American people, and I'm as guilty of that as anybody, get frustrated with the slowness of our system in fixing big problems. I think sometimes we believe that the con- tentiousness that we see inside of our govern- ing machine is new phenomenon. Well, it's not. It has always been that way. It has always been contentious and hard to govern the greatest na- IMPACT Interviews Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL) is presented with the IPC Government Impact Award, which recognizes bipartisan leadership on issues facing our industry.