Driving on one of our main thoroughfares, we were stopped behind a car with a bumper sticker that was such a vulgar slam against our President that I will not repeat it here. There was a time when we wouldn’t speak of the county dog-catcher in such terms. And yet this is increasingly commonplace.

So often we act like this is just harmless good fun. But I think this is like children who don’t realize that playing with matches can burn down the house until it does. We attack the character of our office holders until any self-respecting person is unwilling to endure such treatment.  We engage in ad hominem attacks on those who disagree with us, not realizing that we might in the process turn fellow-citizens with whom we share much in common and with whom we differ on some things into intractable enemies. We reject the time honored arts of compromise in which reasonable people find ways to arrive at the best approximation to agreement on what will serve the public good.  And in the process, we convince the more volatile among us that violence and force rather than reasoned discourse are the only way to get things done.

What is most troubling to me is that it seems that we easily forget that those with whom we differ and those they represent are also citizens and that we all share the rights, responsibilities and considerable benefits of living in this country. Why must we be attacked as a country to remember this? Why must we identify some greater enemy to stop treating each other as enemies? And why do we forget that the idea behind e pluribus unum is that our diversity coupled with our common citizenship (we are all Americans) is what makes us strong as a nation.

For those who are Christians, we believe that the diverse members of our one body are like diverse parts of a single body. Eliminating our diversity is like cutting off a part of our own body. Can we determine that while we will engage in vigorous and principled argument about what best makes for a good society, that we will refuse to attack the character of those with whom we disagree, because to do so is to attack our very selves?

If we value those with whom we disagree, we might even listen to them and try to figure out why they disagree with us and how they could think the way they do. A civil discussion engages what a person is really saying, not our caricature of what they are saying.

Above all, civility is rooted in the idea of treating others as we’d like to be treated. We don’t want our own character to be impugned. We consider our own ideas rational and well thought out.  We want others to carefully listen to us and to engage us in terms of what we are actually saying. This is the Golden Rule principle, and for good reason–the practice of this rule is precious, and sadly, all too rare.