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 [ LOS ANGELES ](https://mail.citywatchla.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&id=312)

#  Incivility

**COMMENTARY**-If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem. Incivility has become the hallmark of our current regime.

Written by Liz Amsden.

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September 21 2020

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**COMMENTARY**-If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem. Incivility has become the hallmark of our current regime.

The President incites his followers against immigrants, science, Arabs, women, and those accused of crimes whether guilty or not.

Meanwhile, the wholesale move to the internet of an entire generation as their primary mode of human interaction, has allowed individuals to insult, malign, lie and promote hate speech with impunity.

Would-be adults acting like small children – nyah-nyah nah nyah-nyah.

Under his leadership he has marginalized many of the foregoing, applying policies differently to different groups.

He idolizes and attempts to emulate demagogues like Putin and Kim Jong Un.

Using the anger stirred up by rubbing salt in the wounds of the dissatisfied.

OUR responsibility as individuals should be to other people, protecting *their* rights not to be insulted, maligned, etc. Do we have an obligation to protect outliers’ purported First Amendment rights?

If we do not resolve this ourselves, the only solution will be to have what is essentially martial law enforced from above. The ultimate win for Team Trump. And the utter demolition of democracy.

In 1990, in a determination on freedom of expression watched around the world, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in [*R v Keegstra* ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Keegstra)that there have to be limits set to maintain civil society, and that prohibition of hate propaganda is justified. The majority of Justices looked at hate speech as not being a *victimless* crime, but instead having the potential for psychological harm, degradation, humiliation, and a risk of violence.

Perhaps making obscene gestures or indicating thumb down or even turning ones back in a meeting would not meet the sniff test for a hate crime. Perhaps calling someone racist or making a derogatory comment about a third party or claiming an ethnic or religious group are responsible for a problem or a crisis or.

Ah. . .and now we are getting close to that thin multi-hued line. . .

Wouldn’t it just be cleaner if we always imagined ourselves having the discussion in Great-aunt Isabella’s front parlor and comported ourselves accordingly?

Whether at home, in a meeting, in public, on Zoom or in social media posts.

I think I’d like to live like that.

Life is too short to foster unnecessary incivility. Let’s make love instead.

*(Liz Amsden is an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She also writes on behalf of the Budget Advocates’ mission regarding the City’s budget and services. In her real life she works on budgets, for film and television, where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today’s world.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.*

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