Polarized by Polarized; the Collapse of Truth Civility & Community in Divided Times… (2019)

Author:Polarized; the Collapse of Truth, Civility & Community in Divided Times… (2019)
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781633884557
Publisher: Prometheus Books

Some of my childhood memories have been lost in the mists of time, but I do remember “duck and cover” drills. I recall practicing survival skills during a nuclear attack, which required us to file calmly into the school hallway and crouch against the wall. As added insurance, we were to grab a coat on the way out the door (it did not matter who it belonged to) and use it to shield our heads from flying glass and other debris. Aside from the futility of such a practice, it never occurred to me to wonder what we should do if the dirty Commies attacked Decatur, Georgia, during the school months of September through November, or March through May, when it was too warm to wear coats.

But I digress. Nuclear war, or any other kind of war, is not a laughing matter, but the breakdown in civility is framing it as something worse—acceptable. As you say, violence becomes the default setting in human relationships when we cease defining the “other” as human. War and genocide are the logical ends of a society that has adopted the motto of “shoot first and ask questions later.” A few months before my retirement, I attended a workshop led by our local police department on tactics for dealing with an active shooter in a public space. In this case, the public space was a church. I never dreamed I would see the day when the church I served would affix stickers to exterior doors depicting a handgun in a red circle with a slash through it, and openly discuss whether we should lock our doors after worship began on Sunday mornings. I refused to consider the latter suggestion, but I was fully aware that the presence of two multicolored benches emblazoned with the words “All Are Welcome Here” outside our building made us a target. As I write these words, the news is full of reports about the senseless murder of eleven worshippers at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.1 I fear we no longer have the luxury of keeping our distance from such atrocities by labeling them aberrations and the perpetrators as “crazy.” We must confront the complicity of our leaders, and our own complicity, in the disintegration of civility.

If incivility is feeding this hatred and paranoia, what is to be done? When the president of the United States labels Democrats “treasonous” and “un-American” because they would not stand and applaud his State of the Union speech,2 how can civility be restored? What hope is there when the resident of the White House engages in taunts and tirades our mothers would not have tolerated in our five-year-old mouths?

I must begin by admitting there has never been a “golden age of civility” to which we can return. As much as we Southerners liked to think ourselves genteel and civilized during our childhood days, the very air we breathed was laced with racism. Though none of the adults in my life would ever have

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