Category: Civility

MY LATEST LUNG BATTLE: GASPING FOR BREATH IN A WORLD GONE MAD

For months now, I’ve been ingesting a plethora of antibiotics and sucking relentlessly on a nebulizer tube, all in an effort to slay an intractable lung infection. Instead of the meds, maybe I should have followed the current cultural norm and gone after this bacteria with a brutal and debilitating social media attack. After all, the most popular road to conflict these days seems to be paved with verbal viciousness.  

(Please stay with me on this; a point is about to emerge.)

As Joe Biden would say, here’s the deal: A friend died recently. She was someone I worked closely with decades ago; someone I admired and respected; someone with whom I lost contact, except for occasional Facebook posts.  A text message from a mutual friend said she died of COVID.  Her obituary, however, was silent on the cause of death, noting only that the end came after a “hard-fought battle.” 

The omission struck me as ironic. My friend had been a journalist. She never shied from a clear presentation of the facts. Between a quick perusal of my former colleague’s old Facebook posts, and a story in the current edition of The Atlantic, I figured out what was going on.  

Her FB page captures the woman I remember from 30 years ago.  Retirement clearly did not extinguish her passion; it merely opened up new avenues for it. According to her posts, she was thoroughly disgusted with both political parties, thought Emmanuel Macron should be removed as president of France, and urged friends to “read more books and be nice to each other.”  

But here’s the kicker: There was also a small smattering of messages in support of the anti-vaccine movement. “Imagine,” one of them read, “getting four vaccine shots in one year and calling unvaccinated people crazy.” I hadn’t pegged her as an anti-vaxxer, but it wasn’t a total surprise. Her world view wasn’t designed for pigeonholes.  

Then I read The Atlantic piece titled, “People Are Hiding That Their Unvaccinated Loved Ones Died of COVID.”   It turns out there is a rabid army of anti-anti-vaxxers out there just champing at the bit to publicly curse the corpses of unvaccinated COVID victims.  

These fully vaccinated guardians of morality delight in mocking the deaths of anti-vaxxers. Imagine being consumed with grief while preparing to bury a parent only to be bombarded with messages like this: “Glad your mom died. Too bad she wasn’t vaccinated.” To avoid such abuse, according to The Atlantic, many families of deceased unvaccinated COVID victims are omitting the cause of death in obituaries and other public announcements. 

It gets worse. Hundreds of thousands of supposedly concerned and caring pro-vaxxers have taken to web sites to display screenshots of anti-vaccination posts from mostly ordinary folks who subsequently died of COVID (here, here and here).  Their deaths are mocked, praised and championed. One site posthumously “honors” each death with an award named after Herman Cain, a former Republican presidential candidate who died of COVID shortly after appearing maskless at a Donald Trump campaign rally. 

In less than two years, this pandemic has infected more than 72 million Americans, killed more than 870,000 of us, and shattered the lives of untold millions.  We now add a new category to the box scores of devastation: Deaths Celebrated.  

Call me naïve, but I didn’t see this coming. Sure, our public discourse has degenerated into an ugly verbal food fight. Where we once valued serious debate and dialogue over conflicting issues, we now rush to social media with vile insults and threats for those with whom we disagree. As disheartening as that development has been, however, going from a poisoned thumb tweet about someone whose beliefs you dislike, to dancing on their grave, is one enormous jump.  I so wish we had not made it.

I did not crawl out of my convalescence for the purpose of defending anti-vaxxers. They are completely wrong on the facts. Their actions have hindered efforts to control the virus. That in no way, however, makes it right to mock their deaths and desecrate the grieving process of their bereaved families and friends. Death with dignity is woven deeply into our humanity. It is not contingent upon having the right beliefs.

For centuries, our culture has embraced elaborate norms aimed at respecting the dead and comforting their grieving loved ones. Seventeenth century English poet John Donne, in a far less gender-inclusive era, captured the sentiment well with his famous lines: “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” 

Even in war, there is respect for the dead. The military in most western countries have elaborate rules for the solemn and dignified care and handling of the bodies of enemy soldiers killed in action.  

Remember the Westboro Baptist Church and its picketing of funerals?  Leaders of the small independent congregation believed that the death of service members in Iraq and Afghanistan were God’s punishment for the country’s tolerance of gay people.  As the caskets containing the bodies of dead soldiers were lowered into the ground, the Westboro crew carried signs denigrating the deceased.  There was unanimous – bipartisan and universal – shock and repulsion over this grossly irreverent taboo.  

Unfortunately, the Herman Cain Awards and their ilk were not met with the same reaction. They should have been. To celebrate anyone’s death, to inflict even more pain upon grieving families, rips at the very fabric of our humanity.  

And that diminishes all of us.

POLITICIANS SAY THE DARNDEST THINGS; THEY NEED TO STOP

Comparing Ted Cruz to a vampire  is out; comparing Hilary Clinton to the anti-Christ is in. Saying that Susan Collins is ignorant is out; saying that Rachel Maddow looks like Justin Bieber and should wear a necklace is in. Calling Mitch McConnell Lord Voldemort is out; calling Mitt Romney a pompous ass is in. Yes indeed, the hierarchy of vituperation has been reordered by those mavens of interpersonal communication known as the United States Senate.

Those outs came from Neera Tanden, the vanquished Biden nominee to head the Office of Management and Budget. The ins were from the mouths and Twitter fingers of, in the first two instances, Trump cabinet nominees confirmed by the Senate and, in the “pompous ass” example, from Trump himself, without a modicum of senatorial concern over decorum. 

All of those phrases exemplify disparagement through invective.  Such quips among like-minded folks may help reduce stress and win laughs. Viewed more widely, however, most linguists and conflict resolution experts will tell you that they are not conducive to crafting agreement among various factions (here, here and here).

Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, the Tanden confirmation battle totally evaded a serious – and long overdue – discussion about the role of civil discourse in governance. Instead, we got a Don Rickles cage fight over whose insults were the worst. 

Conservatives insisted that Tanden’s abrasive tweets disqualified her for the job because she insulted so many congressional leaders. Liberals trotted out a database of Trump’s 10,000 insults, along with impertinent slams from the former president’s cabinet nominees blessed by the Senate.  

Although she may well have been less offensive than her Republican counterparts, Tanden lost her confirmation battle over the slings and arrows of a churlish Twitter feed. In terms of distributive justice, the outcome was less than fair.  Others have said far worse and suffered no penalty.  

Yet, the saddest part of this whole episode is that it ended without any discussion, or even recognition, of the rampant degradation of political speech.  When our leaders routinely go for the jugular and deny or demean the humanity of partisan adversaries, they set the stage for the rest of the country.  That’s why, according to recent polling, 93 percent of respondents think incivility is a problem, and 68 percent see it as a crisis.  

The problem reaches far beyond the beltway.  A Democratic state legislator in New York tweeted this to a Republican staffer during the week before Christmas:  “Kill yourself.”  A  Republican official in Kansas took out over an American Indian running for Congress with this Facebook post: “Your radical socialist kick boxing lesbian Indian will be sent back packing to the reservation.”  

Then there is this tweet, from a Democrat running for Congress in North Carolina: “Screw they go low, we go high bullshit. When (GOP) extremists go low, we stomp their scrawny pasty necks with our heels and once you hear the sound of a crisp snap you grind you heel hard and twist it slowly side to side for good measure. He needs to know who whupped his ass.”

Apologists for this kind of toxic invective by political leaders are quick to note that the tradition dates back to the early days of the republic.  Thomas Jefferson reportedly called John Adams a “repulsive pedant” and a “hideous hermaphroditical character.”  Adams supposedly called Jefferson “the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father.” However, without social media or cable television, Jefferson and Adams could hack away at each other all day without the rest of the country knowing about it. Like the proverbial tree falling in the forest, a diabolical insult needs to be heard in order to do damage. 

And that is precisely what is happening now. Incivility, according to numerous studies, is contagious (here, here and here). Many otherwise genteel folks hear and read the gushing vitriol of their leaders, and then slowly amp up their own tone and volume when talking about politics.  Suddenly Thanksgiving dinner turns into a verbal Battle of the Bulge.  

Even more insidious, however, is that vitriolic political rhetoric is seen by many experts as a serious threat to our democracy.  Jeremy Frimer is a University of Winnipeg professor who studies the weaponization of incivility in politics.  Here’s what he wrote: “Incivility can create a sense that subjugating the rights of a political party is both justified and necessary, and thus leads to democratic collapse.”

Think back on the political messages floating around this past year.  How many times have Republican leaders used the term “socialist” to describe Democrats?  How many times have Democratic leaders used the term “racist” to describe Republicans?  In our world of endless metrics, it is remarkable nobody kept track.  Yet, a pollster tried to measure the impact of those pitches.  The result?  Eight of ten Republicans believe the Democratic party has been taken over by socialists, while 8 in 10 Democrats believe the GOP has been taken over by racists.  Add to that a “stolen election”, one imaginary and the other attempted-but-real, and you will have the perfect case study of how incivility can take us to the brink of insurrection.  

That’s why one-third of Americans who identify as Democrat or Republican believe that violence could be justified to advance their parties’ objectives.  That’s why our Capitol is currently surrounded by National Guard troops and razor wire-topped fencing.

I have no doubt that Neera Tanden would have made an excellent OMB director. Her apologies for the mean tweets were sincere and unqualified, (an object lesson for Andrew Cuomo). Pardon my wishful thinking, but wouldn’t it be wonderful if this whole sad episode turned into one of those infrequent aha moments? There are, of course, far better reasons for our leaders to lay off the name-calling. But if losing out on a Cabinet-level position gets some pols to dial it back a bit, so be it. Whatever it takes. Inertia is a potent force, but we Americans have changed directions many times in our history.  It’s time to do it again.

Before it’s too late. 

CRUISING THE ROAD TO TOLERANCE WITH MY MAGA COUSIN

I’d like you to meet my cousin Jaime. Frequent visitors to this space may have stumbled upon his occasional retorts (here and here) on my leftist pontifications. Jaime is a God fearin’, gun totin’, Trump lovin’ kind of guy.  If Hillary Clinton had ever met him, she would have quickly certified him as one of the deplorables. And Jaime would have worn it as a badge of honor.  

Well, Madam Secretary, I know Jaime Nelson.  We grew up together. Our fathers were brothers, and our families are close. Jaime Nelson is no deplorable. He’s a good man with a gruff exterior and a big heart. He is also a passionate supporter of Donald Trump and his policies, an agenda that many of us view as anathema to all that we hold dear.

This essay is neither a tribute nor a rebuttal to my cousin.  It’s an examination of a widening and dangerous fault line in our current combustible political culture. How do we – or, even, should we – maintain personal and familial connections with those whose world view so diametrically conflicts with our core values. 

We have never had a moment quite like this one.  The Gore-Bush debacle in 2000 was hard-fought, but did little or no permanent damage to family relationships. The reaction to Obama in 2008 was more visceral. Yet, as Republican pollster Frank Lutz told the New York Times, “With Obama, people hated him or people loved him. But you weren’t evil for how you felt.”  In recent polling, Lutz found that at least a third of those questioned said they had stopped talking to a friend or family member as a result of disagreement over Trump.

Carolyn Lukensmeyer is the director of the National Institute for Civil Discourse, a conflict resolution consultancy. During the 2012 presidential election, she said her outfit “got not a single message from anybody in the country about incivility.” Once Trump was elected, however, she said her business skyrocketed with pleas for help from clergy members, corporate CEOs and other organization leaders whose constituencies were at each other’s throats. “This is now deep in our homes, deep in our neighborhoods, deep in our places of worship and deep in our workplaces,” Lukensmeyer told a reporter. “It really is a virus.”

Unfortunately, there is no easy vaccine for this virus.  The divide over Trump and his policies cuts deeply through the bone and into the core of our marrow.  To many of us, Trumpism is a vile form of hatred, of women, of racial and ethnic minorities, of the LGBTQ community and others at the margins of our society. Jaime and his fellow Trumpers, however, see themselves marginalized by the political establishment. They have a sense of being left behind by a system that has little regard for native-born American white people who worked hard, only to be looked down upon and shoved aside by immigrants and diversity programs. They feel hated and ridiculed by many of us who resist Trump and his politics of hate and ridicule.

Here is the question: Can we passionately oppose Trumpism and still maintain a connection with the MAGA people in our lives?  Before answering, let me make this even tougher by using Cousin Jaime as an example. Here are two of his recent Facebook posts, both generated by a conservative site.  The first is a picture of an enthused and energetic Beto O’Rourke. The copy reads: “Obama: Now Available In Vanilla”.  Then there’s a picture of Obama and Hillary Clinton embracing under this heading: “This is the only time you will ever see a Muslim hugging a pig.”

Pretty vile, right? They go against everything we bleeding heart liberals believe in.  Why not hit the unfriend button?  Yet, after knowing Jaime for nearly 60 years, I have much more data about who this guy is. He is more than his Facebook page. He has showered my family with repeated acts of kindness over the years.  He’s also posted anti-bullying messages on Facebook, along with this sage piece of advice, attached for unknown reasons, to a picture of John Wayne: “Just because I disagree with you doesn’t mean I hate you. We need to relearn that in our society.”

Yes, I cringe a bit at a few of his political posts, just as I do with some posted by fellow liberals. Like this one: “At this point, if you still support Trump you are either rich, racist or just plain stupid.”  Or this one: “Why I am not a Republican: I don’t hate women. I don’t hate minorities. I don’t hate the poor. I don’t hate gay people. I’m not greedy and I’m not a traitor.”

As for the question posed a few paragraphs ago, the answer is yes, I believe it is possible – and necessary – for us to maintain personal and family connections with those whose politics we abhor.  The basic tenets of liberalism are based on the values of treating people with kindness, dignity and respect.  One of the main reasons Trump drives us up the wall is that he dehumanizes large groups of people.  He sees Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug dealers. He wants to ban all Muslims and black and brown people from “shithole countries.”  Writing friends and family members off on the basis that all Trump supporters are stupid or racist is playing a card from our opponent’s hand.

Obviously, every situation is different. I’m not sure I could sit down at the dinner table with a relative who donned a white hood and carried a tiki torch through the streets of Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us.”  But that’s not everyone in MAGA World.  I suspect Cousin Jaime disagrees with at least 90 percent of everything I have written in this space. Yet, his comments have always been directed at the substance of my content, never an attack on me. The fact that we can vehemently disagree about Trump but still care for each other is a rare ray of hope at a time of intense division and animosity.

In another context, we of the progressive persuasion, have stood steadfast in our belief that our country should build bridges to the world rather than wall ourselves off from it. Regardless of what happens in 2020, the eventual healing process for this virus of division is going to take a long time. Between now and then, we need bridges, not walls, in our relationships with those on the other side of this political divide. As my cousin says, we can choose to disagree without hatred.  For the sake of our country, our families and our own quality of life, that’s a far, far better road to follow. 

FORGET CIVILITY. FIGHT TRUMP WITH WHATEVER WORKS

It seemed so clear to me when I started writing this post: tossing the president’s press secretary out of a restaurant was wrong. So were the boisterous dining disruptions that protesters foisted upon other Trump surrogates. Aren’t we supposed to go high when they go low? All this does is let the Trumsters play the victim card, right? Then a funny thing happened: I changed my mind.

Believe me, that was a painful experience. We all have our own style and approach to dealing with conflict, born of our life experiences. I spent more than 30 years as a union rep, tangling with some pretty virulent management types. The only real control I had – on a good day – was over myself. I chose civility, decency and respect, not out of a higher moral calling, but because that approach worked for me and my goal of helping union members get the best contract possible. That meant avoiding personal attacks and name-calling, and sticking to the issue at hand, while building power to make a decent deal.

So I cruised right along on my high horse, crafting this ode to civility and respect. I reread my words, searching for a pithy and righteous close. That’s when it struck me. I was wrong. This is Donald Trump’s America now, an ugly, hateful abyss that keeps turning darker and bleaker by the hour. Civility and respectfulness are not going to get our country back anytime soon.

During this past week:

A California woman screamed at a U.S. citizen of Mexican descent that Mexicans are “rapists, animals and drug dealers”, echoing one of Trump’s favorite litanies.

A Tennessee congressional candidate put up a billboard vowing to “Make America White Again”.

A South Carolina woman was charged with beating a black child and screaming racial epithets at him because he was swimming in a pool with white kids.

A North Carolina man who insists that God is a white supremacist and the Jews descended from Satan won the Republican primary for a seat in the state legislature.

Thousands of children, many in diapers, remain separated from their migrant parents as a result of Trump’s unconscionable political power play at the border.

The Supreme Court upheld Trump’s Muslim travel ban and delivered a serious blow to organized labor. With Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement, credible court observers predict that abortion rights will be abolished within 18 months, and that the court will tilt severely rightward for decades to come.

In other words, Donald Trump is doing precisely what he promised. He is shaking up the foundations of our country at levels totally off the Richter Scale. This isn’t a collegial debate over tax policy or farm subsidies. This is a historic existential battle for the heart and soul of America. We are in a cold civil war that is getting warmer by the day. It will take more than civility to win this one.

Earlier this week, California Congresswoman Maxine Waters was wildly cheered by a crowd of energized millennials when she told them: “If you see anybody from that cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. You push back on them. Tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere!” By the end of the week, Waters had canceled all public appearances because of death threats. Trump called her “unhinged” with an “extraordinarily low IQ” and claimed – incorrectly – that she had threatened to harm his supporters. Then came top congressional Democrats, Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, both blasting Waters for encouraging such incivility. Said Schumer: “If you disagree with a politician . . . vote them out of office. But no one should call for the harassment of political opponents. That’s not right. That’s not American.”

Oh yes it is, Senator. The Civil Rights Act did not flow majestically from a reasoned debate by golden tongued orators. It took years of street protests and massive harassment of political opponents. As Jonathan Bernstein, a former university professor, wrote for Bloomberg this week, “From the American Revolution on, the spoils of freedom, fair treatment and equality have not gone to the patient and polite. The spoils have gone to those who are incensed and determined, unafraid and unashamed to raise more than a little hell.”

No, embarrassing cabinet members in restaurants and other direct actions are not going to end our Trumpian nightmare. But they are viable tactics in a broader strategy to do just that, by flipping at least one of the two congressional chambers in November and removing Trump from office in the 2020 election, if not before. It’s all about voter turnout, tapping into the passion of those millennials who cheered Maxine Waters’ call to action, reaching blacks, Latinos and others, disenchanted with both parties, but ready to act now against a president intent on marginalizing them. Those actions pull them in, strengthen the movement and evolve into votes.

As a personal matter of style, I will continue to choose civility. If I owned a restaurant, I’d let Sarah Huckabee Sanders eat there. On the other hand, if someone tosses her out because of the abhorrent policies she has to defend, it reminds us all that these are not ordinary times. It reminds us that the rules of political discourse have to change in order to accommodate the toxicity of an environment that threatens the values we hold dear.

We don’t have to become Trump to beat Trump, but neither should we cling blindly to an honor code of civility when dealing with a lying thug who takes children away from their parents and emboldens bigotry of every stripe. That, Senator Schumer, is what is really not American.