Help the Knights of Columbus Restore Civility to American Politics
. . . The timing of this movement couldn't be better. According to the website, the Knights of Columbus and the Marists co-sponsored a poll that clearly demonstrates that the majority of Americans - 78% - are frustrated with the tone of the political campaigns now in full swing leading up to the presidential election. 74% believe this negative campaigning is only going to get worse. 64% of Americans say that negative "attack ads” hurt the political process. Major candidates, their parties, and political action committees (PACS) are going to spend a record-setting $6.5 billion on television and cable TV ads in this election year, and that doesn't even include newspapers, magazines, and all those unsightly billboards. A rapidly growing percentage of those ads are negative. Political attack ads draw politics away from the notion of civil service and into the arena of winners and losers in which the former triumph while the latter feel disenfranchised. These attack ads stifle bi-partisan cooperation for the good of all for years to come. They reduce politics to the service of a party or a platform instead of to the service of America and its people. We need to send a strong message before this downward spiral of toxic rhetoric in the name of politics gets any worse. . . .
Sticks and Stones: My Incendiary Blog Post on Catholic Civil Discourse
. . . In the online world, we can be anyone or no one at all. We can light fires with our words, or we can fan an inferno lit by someone else. We are free to write with the assurance that no one out there knows who we are, or can suspect what is truly in our hearts. We can strip the Beatitudes from our soulful existence, and let anger and disdain run amok. We can take a rumor and run with it without ever stepping for a single moment into the shoes of the subjects of our contempt. We can delude ourselves into kneeling before God with thanks that we are truly unlike that tax collector over there on the other side of the Church. We can pat ourselves on the back believing that his sin, now in the open, is so much worse than our own, still hidden behind the veil of cyberspace - hidden from everyone but God. . . .