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Showing posts from January, 2019

Preaching Civility in an Uncivil Time

Who can shout the loudest? Who expresses the most outrage? Who can stand by their position unfailingly, regardless of contradictory facts or new information? Welcome to public discourse in the 21st century. Were we always so entrenched in our beliefs and opinions, or is this a new phenomenon? It certainly feels  like something has changed. I seem to recall a time when the nightly news consisted of an anchor at a desk, reading the facts of the day and cutting away to fellow journalists for a deep dive into stories of interest. Now your typical news broadcast is a gathering of supposed experts on the topic du jour  having a go at each other's throats until the referee (err ... newscaster ) steps in to break for commercial. And what do we, the viewers, do at home? We root, root, root for the home team, which in this context would be whichever talking head is most closely aligned with our position. And then there's social media, and that great moral sinkhole of our time: t