Poem: September 28, 2019

Civil Discourse, 2019

So easy to fear the consequences
of your own voice. Say something,
stand for anything in public, with
conviction, in a meeting, or worse,
on the web, and you invite another
point of view to come at you like
a bulldozer, not so much a civil
conversation as a counter strike,
and it's not even that you lack
confidence in your own ideas, or
that you are concerned that you
are wrong or ill-equipped to carry
out a persuasive and well-reasoned
argument. It's that persuasive and
well-reasoned arguments take so
much time and rarely seem either
persuasive or well-reasoned to
the people who have taken your
claim as a windmill to tilt at, an
occasion to stamp out the ugliness
they see. And it's so easy to be
misinformed, and it's so easy to be
hateful, and all of us are defending
something larger than ourselves,
some bigger picture, some way of
life, some victim in all of this, or
the banner of a revolution, or the
integrity of an institution. All of us
with megaphones, all prepared to
use them, except that using them
means taking sides and notching up
the volume, and laying out truths
that no matter how truthful, really
come down to how and when we
were raised, and you know they will
be one day used against us, backward
evidence that never changes, even
if we do, and so our voices become
the terrible storms that leave us
stranded from one another, roaring
and whipping and making sure we
are unable to be heard when it counts.