It’s not the most attractive-sounding word, civility, but it’s a word I’ve been thinking a lot about lately.
Most recently, the word was goosed from my brain’s basement by the moving tributes to the late President Gerald Ford, particularly the heartfelt and eloquent eulogies given by former President Jimmy Carter and presidential historian Richard Norton Smith.
Carter, voice breaking, spoke of a deep and abiding friendship with a man who once had been a political opponent for election to the most powerful position in the world. Smith, eyes flashing, spoke to the Ford qualities that allowed such a friendship first to be possible, and second to flourish.
At the root of what they spoke about was civility, defined in the dictionary as a civil or polite act or utterance — but in human terms, an ability to see beyond one’s own vision, to hear beyond the sound of one’s own voice, to make room for some “otherness” in one’s consideration of issues and events, to temper the monologue to allow room for dialogue.
I found my own voice breaking when I told my daughter she was too young to remember such an age, when players of the magnitude of Carter and Ford were able to call each other “my distinguished opponent” and mean it, with no trace of sarcasm or irony. And let’s be real: She also is too young to remember an age when regular people, forget world players, accommodate each other with the same regard.
And the Ford speeches and ceremonies served to remind me of a most uncivil time in my own life — can it really be almost 10 years ago? — when a different president was in a different sort of jam, and the discourse about the investigations into President Clinton’s misbehaviors were anything but civil.
Working as the editorial page editor of my newspaper then, and presiding over opinions that did not back the impeachment of the president, I often felt like that knight at the beginning of the Monty Python movie, the one sliced up and chopped to bits by an opponent, only to keep mouthing, “Merely a flesh wound,” even when he was down to just being a head on the ground.
I own my actions in that nasty time: Memory suggests I wrote some excoriating editorials, and my page printed letters with withering, unwavering views about the farce/tragedy being played out in Washington, which meant I hosted a forum to some of that great unpleasantness. I was an uneasy rider of the seesaw between free speech vs. editorial discretion, and I was not always wise in my choices of what to print.
And so it was that a group of people in my community contacted me to talk about the need to restore civility to the public conversation. I was only too happy to provide the forum for that discussion, too.
It grew from an idea to a practice:
For several years my former community set aside a week in October to observe “a week of civility,” and it grew to include commemorations in cities, observances by law enforcement and programs in school. In fact, the last year I lived there, I helped to arrange and produce a music video — written and performed by a local hiphop/pop group — about tolerance and civility that played in every public school classroom in the county. (Believe it or not, I still have a copy of the video; you can see it through an online link with this column.)
And though Civility Week did not put me in the same league as, say, P Diddy or Timbaland, it did place me on the pitcher’s mound of a spring-training/minor-league baseball stadium with a living legend. It was Civility Day at the ballpark and two of us threw out the first ball of that day’s game: I threw like a girl, my pitch falling like a dying quail halfway to home plate; the great Earl Weaver’s pitch completely respectable (and he was exceedingly civil).
So who knows where a little civility will take you?
Why don’t we find out?
I think Courier-Journal territory is, for the most part, very civil. But I bring all this up now because ongoing and future efforts at engaging in community conversations about issues that affect some of us or all of us will have a better chance at succeeding if we use the Carter/Ford model of civility I mentioned earlier in this column:
An ability to see beyond one’s own vision, to hear beyond the sound of one’s own voice, to make room for some “otherness” in one’s consideration of issues and events, to temper monologue to allow room for dialogue.
Civility doesn’t turn people into Casper Milquetoasts. Indeed, passion about ideas and commitment to ideals are the sparks to the vital debate that fuels democracies. Civility just serves to keep the give-and-take warm rather than raging.
Give-and-take is a tradition at this news organization.
The Courier-Journal’s commitment to interaction with readers extends far past the birth of the Internet, which has made the exchange quicker and easier: The newspaper pioneered the concept and position of a news ombudsman — now public editor, a job I’ve held for five years — 40 years ago, to give readers a voice and an advocate in the newsroom and in other reaches of the organization.
The newspaper has long had a vibrant letters to the editor feature, with more than 3,000 letters printed each year in the paper. The Internet has more than doubled that number of reader contributions to the Forum, with thousands more letters now posted exclusively online.
In the past year, the “chat” function has been added to stories on courier-journal.com, which invites readers to weigh in on issues big and small.
And in the coming year, you will see more C-J efforts to bring people together to discuss community issues and to pursue solutions to questions they would like to see answered.
Of course, you are welcome to contact me at any time to make suggestions, but in the next few weeks I’ll write more specifically about opportunities to exchange and share ideas — and to revisit the guidelines for the “chat” function on Internet stories, a particular concern for me.
Until then — and beyond! — happy new year.
