Sitting beside someone the other evening who admired Toronto Mayor Rob Ford was a bit of a trial. When he went on to laud Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s award of Statesman of the Year, there was an urge to use brute force to silence him.
But he had a right to his opinion. While he appeared (to us) to be ignorant and misled, you try desperately to understand where this person is coming from. What will it take to educate him? You try to analyze the situation. Can he convince others to think as he does? If the answer is ‘no,’ maybe you can dismiss him from your mind and go on to weightier matters. And, even if the answer is ‘yes,’ the physical act of hitting him will feel good but will solve nothing.
A reader wrote the other day that I fear for civility and our ability to get along with one another in very basic and practical ways. He was writing about Mayor Ford’s seeming propensity for breaking laws that were inconvenient for him. The reader could not understand a man, who wants to be a leader, not realizing the impact of leading by example.
The reader goes on to say: I believe I have been witnessing a decline in civility in recent years. Our social fibre is less rigorous, certainly less responsibly social. Unthinking and selfish individualism has been on the rise. It’s part of the “Government back off, this land is my land” ignorance and selfishness. He concludes with the comment: They just haven’t been civilized. They think such behaviour is for wimps.
This thinking was in mind when trying to understand Romney and Ryan’s reaction to the death of American diplomats in Libya. These shallow, crass people used this ugly, tragic event to further their own ambitions, to attack the president of the United States of America. The president is required to speak on behalf of the nation in reaction to incidents such as this and all they are proving is that they are inadequate to the task.
Looking at the incident, the quickly assembled riots throughout the Muslim world seem to be gross over-reaction to a piece of garbage video that had no purpose other than to insult. It seems promoting racial hatred is not illegal in America when it hides behind freedom of speech. The problem is that there are elements within the Muslim communities around the world who constantly seek out supposed slights to continue their war of hatred against America.
The world is going through bad times. Civility needs to start at the top. We need leaders who can set an example.
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Copyright 2012 © Peter Lowry
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