The blessings of civility ...

So-called social media gets to be a little more than I can stomach from time to time. I still go back to it, though. I’ve found too many lost friends and comrades therein. I’ve re-established ties with relatives I haven’t heard from in years and made friends with some I barely knew. Sadly, I’ve found that some contacts, on both sides of the political spectrum, whom I thought were kind and gentle like the best of Christians, have what I call an “abscess on their soul.” Fortunately, they are somewhat outweighed by what I call my “Brothers and Sisters of the Beatitudes.”

What’s happened to us? There is a lot of hate boiling on the Internet these days. It can’t be good for us in the long run. Can’t we accomplish more and better things as friends, rather than enemies? Sometimes, I think of a city for which I worked years ago as a consulting city planner. It was in the process of shifting from one political party to another. I had a chance to watch the transition.

It was a fairly benign process. I don’t recall that it affected the condition of the city at all. Government at the most basic “grass-roots” level must avoid the pitfalls of prejudice and the passions of political partisanship that can plague us if it is to survive. I, being wiser then, played my cards carefully. Members of both parties felt I was one of them. I didn’t make any attempt to dissuade them. We all concentrated in making the city and its neighborhoods better. I still maintain friends there and I think the city is a better place to live because we dodged controversy.

Maybe it was easier to do that back in that day. It proved to be a lucky time for me. It comprised an eight-year period of peace and prosperity which we may never see again. It also coincided with my peak earning years. As a result, I became financially secure and a slightly well-regarded fish in a very small, but wonderful, pond. I attribute some, if not much, of my success to keeping my political views to myself.

“Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now…”

- Bob Dyan: My Back Pages.

Peace ...all it takes is
a good pal, and
a change of perspective