civility

Mr. President, you moved a nation today with your words in Tucson. "Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame," you said, "let us use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together."

You also said this: "It's important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds."

Two weeks from now the State of the Union address will be an opportunity to bring Americans together - Americans who have been bitterly divided by party loyalty and ideology, but who stand united in their support for the social programs that have improved our lives for the past seventy-five years. On that night, will they know that somebody has heard them? Will they feel that someone is talking to them? Will they feel they have a voice inside the Capitol rotunda, in a city where they sometimes seem to have been forgotten? more »

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Call it holocaust, lynching, or apartheid -- whatever the atrocity, it always begins with language that privileges us, dehumanizes them, and somehow justifies their removal from our midst. The right has scored some very specific and tangible (and otherwise politically untenable) benefits by the simple act of grinding our discourse down the point where it's now mostly conduced in the coarsest of us-versus-them terms. Somehow, we need to find our way back to each other.

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