Incivility Revisited

This blog is a tad late today.  I play the mandolin in our church music group, and we were honored to sing and play at the funeral of one of our congregation this morning.

Here in what is locally known as SLO County – San Luis Obispo – we now have at least two on-line news and opinion sites.  The first one cannot be trusted.  The second one, SLOSense.com, is just a few months old, if that.  It was begun by a friend of mine who had been living elsewhere for a time, and had just moved back to SLO.  He was appalled by the change in the political discourse at the county level since he is back from what it was when he left, so he started SLOSense.com as a place where people can bring up issues in a safe spot.  When I was Chairman of the Board of Supervisors I did not allow incivility from the public, either when there were public speakers on the various subjects we would be voting on, or from members of the public making cat-calls from the audience.  When we were still in our much over-crowded old Court House, I looked up to see a Deputy Sheriff standing outside the windows watching what was going on.  He was probably on break.  At the same time, I was having trouble getting someone to speak in a civil and respectful manner, so I just motioned to the deputy to come in, which he did, then I motioned him to escort the gentleman out.  Which he did.  Worked really well because people recognized that my bite was as bad as my bark!

Recently we have a majority on our Board who are quite conservative, and the one woman is so far to the right she believes the United Nations is going to come in and take all of our property rights because of something at the UN called Agenda 21.  I always assured the public they could discuss the subjects and express their opinions, but they must do it in civil and respectful manner.  There were no such instructions from the current Board Chairman.  One of my daughters attended a meeting and was so distressed she nearly threw up.  I finally agreed to attend one of the meetings and express my displeasure.  My instruction to the Board Chairman was to, “Pull up your big-boy jeans and take control of these meetings!” Another thing that was lacking at the meeting was any acknowledgement to the people who did get up to speak.  A simple, “Thank you for your comments” is all that is called for.

Recently I posted something on SLOSense about how foolish the City Council was to have initiated two measures, A & B, to take away binding arbitration from the police and fire department unions.  The campaign was so vitriolic against the first responders that a great many of the senior, experienced officers resigned.  A few immediately, and more over-time as they attained the years to do so.  One of our daughters was one of the senior officers who had been assigned to the downtown area of SLO City to manage, whenever possible, the problem with both the transient population as well as the homeless mentally ill.  She retired some two years ago.  A month or so ago the SLO City Downtown Association requested two officers for the downtown area to deal with the transient population and homeless mentally ill.  As her mother, I, of course, thought this was hilarious that it would take two officers to replace what my kid had been doing.  And also, the equipment, salaries and benefits for two officers would be way over what one senior officer would cost the city. 

I posted this info on SLOSense because I wanted to, and I made sure it was a civil posting because my friend had stated that incivility would not be tolerated.  Well, someone, probably using a pseudonym answered my posting in a most insulting and belittling manner.  He was warned about the posting, and then insulted the host of the site.

What this man, at least his name indicated he was male, doesn’t realize is that when you are in politics, for sure, you delight in the fact that someone has freaked out, simply because then you know you are right in what you said.  If someone says, “Oh, that was an interesting comment”, you can be sure what you did or said was not particularly noteworthy.  But if someone comes back and calls you “pathetic” and a “hypocrite”, and uses such words as that you know you have really hit the mark in what you said.  In other words, you know you are being particularly effective when the comments become particularly virulent.  A sort of sick way of knowing how effective you are, but then that is politics.

The lack of civility in much of our public discourse really bothers me in the sense that I know from experience how destructive to the effective work of governing it can be.  Some people are intimidated by just being in the same room with a rude person, much less attending a public meeting rife with incivility.  It is a very effective way of discouraging citizens to come to the meetings to speak their minds.

Let us all demand that our public sites, either on the internet or at a government meeting, be conducted in a respectful and civil manner.