Pursuing Civility as Domestic Peace

Welcome back, Mr. President! We’ve missed you for too long. When you called upon all Americans to take inspiration from murdered nine-year-old Christina Green’s high hopes for our democracy, and from the heroism of those who rushed in to prevent loss of even more lives to a madman’s bullets in Tucson, you practiced the kind of “soul power” Gandhi and King spoke about, and we felt it and felt thankful for it. All of us felt the eeriness, too, of losing this special 9/11-born child to the violence of one of our own, and yet you helped us see her death as a sacrifice that has made us stop in our tracks, reflect on how we are living, and resolve to do better as individuals and a society committed to the daily civility without which our democracy is a hollow shell. Many agreed with you that we must learn and teach how to disagree without being disagreeable, how to turn away from violent and divisive language that turns one’s opponent or competitor into one’s enemy, an object of fear and loathing instead of a neighbor and potential friend with whom one can stand in agreement about many things while working together for great and small things that matter.

This is domestic peace, the “positive peace” about which King wrote so movingly, and the “tranquility” the Founders pursued together and worked so hard to maintain among themselves as visionaries of a new way of living, not just a new nation that would claim the right to wage war like anybody else and to keep guns close at hand to protect themselves from any government or individual that tried to hurt them or take their stuff. Many urged you in recent months to “fight harder” for the public policies you and they regard as necessary for this nation now, in times of financial crisis and global war that have prompted many to abandon the practice of civility and to breach the domestic peace as a more realistic and more effective way of exercising power. Many called upon you to join in the mud wrestling, arm twisting, and distortion mongering that motivates action from fear and antagonism.

Taking wisdom from the life and death of Christina Green, you reminded us once again that the institutions of democracy cannot stand against the violence of the world without the committed habits of a deeper democracy among us, habits based in respectful and skillful practice of the kind of soul power Gandhi, King, and our Founders respected even more than guns, and that you displayed and deployed so well in this time of crisis and loss as a bright beacon of hope for what we and our national and our world can be.