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At the risk of sounding like a social media meme or a Hallmark card, if we can be anything, we should be kind. And if we can’t be kind, maybe we could muster up some simple manners. Or, short of that, perhaps a sort of social neutrality where busting someone’s chops or eviscerating them emotionally is not our primary purpose.
I know. I know. The world is a hard place with sharp edges and difficult people. To be steeled against the rigors of daily life, including interactions with the bellicose, the belligerent and the blowers of hot and intemperate air, one must be tough. But when did gritty, resilient and fierce become mutually exclusive of warmth, goodwill and a functioning set of manners?
According to the aforementioned meme, kindness — or maybe just an absence of personal attack — is an easy gig, requiring little.
Full disclosure: I remain a work in progress when it comes to being fully invested in manners and kindness. But I’m better.
Graciousness is effective, too. If all I have are “gotchas” and insults, whatever problem we’re trying to solve, understanding we’re hoping to come to or even an “agreement to disagree” we’re trying to reach is lost in a steady stream of verbal punches below the belt and pokes in the eye. Little is accomplished, nothing produced.
Such emptiness was on full display in the august halls of Congress recently when former chief medical officer for the White House, Dr. Anthony Fauci, was called to testify before the House Oversight and Accountability Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
Rather than a productive exchange that might have answered questions still surrounding the pandemic, which has taken well over a million American lives, some representatives devolved immediately into unfounded claims and conspiracy theories. Some hearing room audience members took up venomous heckling of Fauci. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green, a consistent font of ad hominem attacks, insisted that Fauci was not a doctor and should be in prison.
Lost in the anger, abuse, guilt by association, name calling and a spirited defense from those trying to shield Fauci from the spew was any chance to further improve our ability to manage and live with a virus that gives every indication it has become part of our lives.
None of Nebraska’s three representative sits on the House Oversight and Accountability Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. If they did, their “Nebraska Nice” bona fides would have been tested. That’s not nice as in greeting cards, kittens and kumbayas but rather nice in a mannerly, direct and dignified way of thinking.
Of greater concern is not a single episode of personal attacks parading around as political discourse, but rather the passive acceptance of ad hominem assaults as the new normal. We may tsk-tsk or express indignation or even write a commentary about it, but most of us shrug and move on, a form of acceptance if not approval.
Much has been written about the coarsening of American society and culture — from a 1996 piece from the National Institutes of Health called “The decline of civility: The coarsening of America” to the book “Vulgarians at the Gate” written nearly 25 years ago to David Brooks’ 2023 essay “How America Got Mean,” to countless studies that show we are indeed “less kind” and “more raging” than we used to be, especially, but not exclusively, in public life.
Some of which I find ironic.
A wide swath of the body politic remains convinced that we have slipped and that our solutions to civic issues lie in the past, somewhere, someplace we once were as a nation. Perhaps. Indeed, I’m arguing over the years we’ve lowered our standards for civil discourse from snarky, chaotic presidential debates to road rage to our modern electronic tableau of communication where personal insults are prominent features.
Still, I find it odd that many of those who argue for this nostalgic wont to embrace the political, social and cultural past, who support leaders bent on such a return to an ill-defined vision of what was regardless of how we get there, are the same cohort who traffic in angry forms of personal attacks — the new politics rather than the old politics, which they profess is our salvation Plus, as an unrepentant wuss hoping for a less caustic life, I’m with Mark Twain, who said, “Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.”
Meme fodder? Maybe. But still better than the alternative. ate comm. Thesnges significantlte’serni and
Republished from the Nebraska Examiner. George Ayoub filed wrote columns, editorials and features for the Grand Island Independent for 21 years.
