TJ FAVELA
In recent years there has been a significant shift in societal behavior marked by increased disrespect and intolerance.
These public meltdowns and verbal attacks are often based on race, religion and appearance.
The deviation from social norms trickles down to the younger generation and impacts children’s behavior. How can we be shocked when kids become bullies, they are mirroring the behavior adults online and offline?
While each party has its own platform, there was a time when they could come together to pass important legislation.
The guiding principle was always upholding the Constitution and working for all of your constituents, not just those who voted for you.
Now, politicians only represent the viewpoints of their base voters and President Donald Trump’s hourly whims.
It’s not rude to call a Nazi a Nazi, a racist a racist or a misogynist a misogynist. Injustice should always be called out politically and socially, especially when people’s essential human rights are being taken away.
There are other times when people have spiraled into profanity, dehumanization outright harassment and physical assault of people based only on political alliances.
Did it start with bragging about grabbing women by their genitalia, or did it begin when we asked for a presidential candidate’s birth certificate? Or was it when the chants of “lock her up” started?
Are we just paying attention since Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said, “I think your fake eyelashes are messing up what you’re reading,” to Rep. Jasmine Crockett. Or when Crockett retorted with, “I’m just curious, just to better understand your ruling: If someone on this committee then starts talking about somebody’s bleach blonde, bad-built, butch body, that would not be engaging in personalities, correct?”
Mind you, this was at a House Oversight and Accountability Committee meeting. Ironically, this is the way those members conduct themselves.
Even more recently, Greene told a U.K. reporter, “Go back to your own country.” Crockett called Gov. Greg Abbott “Governor Hot Wheels.” And Sen. Jim Banks, R-Ind told Mack Schroeder, a fired Department of Health and Human Services worker, that he “probably deserved it. When the man asked him why? Banks said, “Because you seem like a clown.”
This has seeped into almost all aspects of life. Kids are fighting more in classes, disrespecting teachers and administrators. Healthcare workers are being assaulted and accused of working for big pharma, customers routinely abuse employees and road rage is on the rise.
Archon Fung, a political scientist and director of The Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School of Law, said it’s important to distinguish between the different types of civility.
“The first is a superficial kind of civility — being nice, refraining from insults or ad-hominem kinds of argument,” Fung said. “The second is a deeper, more important (and older, for what that’s worth) sense of civility that is about behaving in ways that are necessary for cooperative projects such as schools and democratic societies to work well.”
This is the part we are struggling with: Why can’t we cooperate with each other for the greater good of the nation?
Why are WE against THEM when, in reality, Republicans and Democrats alike need a peaceful democratic society to survive and thrive?
According to polls, American patriotism has decreased in recent years. We care less about patriotism and more about who gets the best media sound bites.
We need to revisit what the Founding Fathers believed when they wrote the Constitution.
“The ordaining of laws in favor of one part of the nation, to the prejudice and oppression of another, is certainly the most erroneous and mistaken policy. An equal dispensation of protection, rights, privileges and advantages, is what every part is entitled to, and ought to enjoy.”
As a society we should take each other’s viewpoints into account, rath-