OPINION: The Road to Decency Begins in the Driveway
Storms bring out the best in neighbors. It can also plant the seeds of civility's rebirth.
By Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
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If one natural disaster — COVID — can accelerate the defraying of American society, perhaps another — a snow storm — can start the motor on its restitching.
Winter Storm Fern is packing a potentially lethal mix of frigid temperatures, ice, and snow over the next two days. Just the type of storm that people do not get through alone.
Throughout the past few days, people have told me of plans to check in on neighbors, of churches that will be opening their doors for people who may lose heat, and of people opening their homes to individuals who need some extra help — being it food or warmth from the elements.
In times like this, people don’t ask your political party, they see a person in need and extend a hand to help.
What should surprise is that it takes a snowstorm to help us see it.
A founding cornerstone of the Advance has been a commitment to promoting and modeling civility.
But defining civility is a challenge. Reducing it to polite behavior and kind talk is to strip civility of its more-challenging components.
A new book by Beth Macy, Paper Girl, pulls back the layers of society that have withered, and in so doing undermined civility in the process.
Macy was a longtime journalist for the Roanoke Times; today she’s one of the country’s leading writers about the pressures that are tearing at the threads of the country’s social fabric.
In Paper Girl, Macy returns to her hometown of Urbana, Ohio, where she grew up poor before escaping in the mid-1980s for Bowling Green University and a future that spared her the fate that befell later citizens of Urbana — drug use, declining opportunity due to a globalizing economy, and the collapse of education that was once the great economic leveler.
She wanted to understand why the town that nurtured her 40-plus years ago as a high school student has today become a town that leaves high school students with no futures and no hope.
It is on one level a story of the collapse of the middle class, but as Macy writes, it’s much more. “Part of this story is what happens when the middle class vanishes,” she writes. “But another crucial element is something Americans have paid far too little attention to — the fact that government stopped thinking of higher education as a public good.”
Schools, Macy contends, as not just where people go to acquire skills, but where “we learn to be human beings with each other. How we learn structure and responsibility and ambition, formally but more important through role models, including bosses at after-school jobs, other people’s parents, and, most of all, life-changing teachers — all the bulwarks of a thriving middle class.”
Macy is correct in how education’s being hollowing out and denigrated is doing the same to local communities.
But its observation about news and our changing relationship with it that is most insightful.
The newspaper I used to deliver and later wrote for had become a ghost of its former self, no longer employing paper girls like me or much of anyone. Where it used to cover everything from DUIs to city council meetings to fire station fundraisers, readers were now left to rely on press releases and Facebook posts, creating a gaping information void in my community’s understand of itself. People now knew every detail of what their national political candidates were saying and doing, but almost nothing about the lives of the neighbors [emphasis added].
In that final sentence, Macy has succinctly summed up why civility in our communities is dying.
The result? When we do talk to people, we screen them first through a national lens. Are you Democrat or Republican? The answer shuts off conversations before they ever get started.
What’s been lost is that we make snap judgments about people based on their national political alignment, but we know nothing about our neighbors’ loves and struggles at work and at home, their favorite sports team or past time, their favorite foods or family backgrounds.
Not knowing these things is what make us “uncivil.” Not knowing our neighbors as human beings makes it all too easy to jump to hate and judgment.
This weekend, as recovery from the storm begins, reach out to your neighbor. Do they have food? Power? Heat?
Shovel their walk, and talk with them about the good things to come — after all, pitchers and catchers report to Spring Training starting February 10. A reminder that warmer days are just ahead.
Share a meal. Swap recipes. Laugh.
And then, hold on to those experiences and build upon them. After the storm is past, turn to conversation before turning to Facebook. Turn to helping your neighbor before reaching for FOX News or MSNOW.
This is how we rebuild civility.
And this weekend, Nature is giving us a reason to begin.
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"In times of crisis, the wise build bridges while the foolish build barriers." -The Black Panther