This past week, I was lucky enough to have Scott Milburn, Governor John Kasich's deputy chief of staff, speak to my communication class. While Scott spent most of his time talking about his role as deputy chief of staff and how to handle crisis communication, there was one topic that he mentioned briefly that caught my attention.

Scott used to work as the communication director for a senator. When talking about this position, he touched on the current inability for the Senate to get much of anything done. To explain this, he wrote the word "CLOTURE" on the white board. Cloture is a procedure in Senate in which a vote is taken to end a debate and take a vote on the subject at hand. In order for this to pass, 60 senators need to vote for the debate to be over. As Scott described it, 60 percent of senators need to agree that it's time for them to shut up and vote. Now, 60 percent seems fairly reasonable, until you realize that the current senate is made up of 54 Republicans, 44 Democrats and 2 Independents. At a time when party division is as high as ever, getting 60 senators to agree on the same thing seems nearly impossible. And so, when the cloture vote doesn't pass, the senators continue to debate, and no vote on an actual law ever takes place. Not much gets done.

The root of this problem can be attributed to one of two things: the cloture rule prohibiting debate from ending, or the strong party divisions prohibiting the cloture vote from passing.

In a way, Scott Milburn attributes it to both. The cloture rule is prohibitive, but only because of the way people are today. As he explained, our founding fathers anticipated our country to have politicians that wanted to work together to get stuff done. They anticipated the value of doing the most good for the most amount of people to stick. They didn't anticipate things like Fox News and Twitter, which drive us apart.

In theory, social media can be a great thing for public opinion. People are able to share their views and learn new perspectives. The Internet is full of diverse opinions and critical information, and it's all at our fingertips. However, too often we don't take advantage of this. Instead of embracing the diversity that social media offers, people surround themselves with voices that agree with them. They filter their newsfeeds to only show opinions that match theirs, and that don't make them uncomfortable. (Check out my article "Why I Haven't Unfriended You On Facebook" to read more about why this is a problem.) So, instead of viewing a diverse set of opinions that allow us to consider others' points of view, empathize and question ourselves, we only see things that reinforce what we already believe. The problem then, as Scott Milburn put it, is that "we are more convinced than ever of our rightness."

When we are so unequivocally convinced that we are right and they are wrong, how do we compromise? How do we work together? How do we work toward what's truly better for our citizens when we are unwilling to consider what anyone else has to say? And, how do we pass a cloture vote?

The problem today, both among politicians and everyone else, is that we are more concerned with being right than working together. We are too stubborn to even allow ourselves to be exposed to someone else's point of view. We are more loyal to our party than our fellow citizens.

In almost every case, extremes don't work. The most productive outcome of any debate comes when two extremes come together and agree on a compromise. In this country, the best things happen when we work together, when we don't bind ourselves by a party, and when we work, as our founding fathers hoped, toward the most good for the most amount of people.