The Echo of Lost Civility

While President Obama had hoped his pitch to a joint session of Congress to pass healthcare reform would resonate with lawmakers, it was instead the shouted “you lie” outburst by Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) that appears to have galvanized supporters on both ends of the political spectrum in a way that more modest speech has yet to achieve.

Though a sharply divided House of Representatives voted to express displeasure with Wilson and his clear breach of protocol, there is reason to fear a less obvious outcome of Wilson’s gambit: the weakening of civil discourse in general, and as a means to facilitate debate in particular. Shouting quite clearly gains people’s attention; we now know that when accompanied by coarseness a mere elevation of one’s speech volume can spawn a repeated, lasting echo. It is not the shouting that hurts, we may learn; it is the echo that causes lasting harm.

The recurring memory of an incident from my junior high school days illustrates my point. There we were, my fellow seventh graders and I, riding for the first time on a school bus that would take us to a neighboring town and away from the small elementary school we’d inhabited for the past seven years. The bus route, typical of a rural community, wound up one country road and down another, picking up farm kids who had to pass a gauntlet of us villagers — we, the more privileged, whose parents could afford to live in town and were not consigned to a life of back-breaking planting and harvesting. At one stop, a home, more of a shanty actually, stood none too sturdily, its grimy windows covered in sackcloth, a smelly kerosene stove sending acrid odors skyward.

From the home’s doorway emerged a young girl, I’ll call her Iris, carrying a weather-beaten purse and a paper bag, presumably holding her lunch. As she approached the bus, a tittering erupted amongst us villagers who had spent our elementary school career with Iris as a classmate. We knew her secret: she smelled badly.

As Iris boarded the bus, we — I — looked elsewhere. Fortunately a seat in the front row directly behind the driver was open and Iris quickly slumped into it, the bus doors closed and off we went trundling down yet another country lane.

Even today I suppose I could make a fairly convincing argument that my behavior on the school bus was nothing more than childhood immaturity, much like Joe Wilson has explained that his shout of “you lie” while President Obama was addressing Congress was because he “got caught up in the moment.”

Lapses of civility can occur for very good reasons — shouting out a warning that there’s a fire in the building counts as one — but when they don’t, when we’re just plain wrong in what we said or how we behaved, there’s only one appropriate course of action: make prompt amends just as Congressman Wilson did.

For some, leaving the matter to an apology will be enough; in the case of Joe Wilson, it’s politics that made him do it, some will say, a desire for an “ah ha” moment that would galvanize support for a conservative backlash against the president’s policies.

As I recall, I felt thusly comforted sitting among my childhood friends on the school bus, whispering and holding our noses closed.


© 2009 Charles A. Conine and Hospitality HR Solutions