Just thinking out loud here, but not so loud that you can’t hear me. Rather, I offer a quiet, oral meditation on civility. It seems to me that, today, people are shouting in the extreme, and not to be heard necessarily (not like the futile voice-raising one does when talking to someone who speaks a different language), but more in an effort to drown out opposing voices. In this way, neither “pro” or “con” is heard. We have, indeed, become “extremely” uncivil to one another. The offense of the words, “You lie!” shouted in the midst of the recent Presidential address to Congress was, and continues to be, offensive not because “you lie,” was a lie, but because it was so completely uncivil. After all, not only does our Congress have rules of order to insure civil behavior, but it has, no doubt, been lied to many times, most recently by the most recently-former president.
I believe that it is time for all of us in this country to take a deep breath, close our eyes, quiet our minds, and just let go. Really. Just let go it all go — all the anger, all the thoughts of “those others,” all the thoughts of our needing to be right, and just let it all go, and be… be still… be quiet… just be. It would be like a collective “time out.” And, just for a moment, our childish tantrums would cease. And, who knows what inner clarity might occur in that moment; what answers might arise? After all, when the king in the old fable scoured the earth to find the “loudest sound in the world” as a birthday gift for his daughter, did he not ultimately find that it was silence?