Is Civility Dead?

Shoot first, ask questions later

Carpentry and other trades teach a mantra, “Measure twice, cut once.” It’s easier to prevent a mistake than fix one. A little foresight is better than a lot of hindsight. Don’t shoot first, ask questions later.

Or, think twice, click send once.

For people who work in local government, most days are rewarding. But not all. Some days are spent on a battlefield, as when a constituent emails a barrage of hateful vitriol to which staff at all levels must scramble to respond. Unwarranted and undeserved, these diatribes carpet-bomb a city or county department with superiority, entitlement, and blame. They describe, in detail, how jobs should be done. They imply staff don’t care, never have, never will.

They shoot first, ask questions later.

In the crosshairs

Email snipers are people who never asked for a conversation, never walked the halls, never said hello. They’ve never seen diplomas on walls or looked into faces with decades of experience. They don’t care about awards won for innovations designed to improve their customer experience and their lives.

They consider government a monolith, not a coordinated group of committed professionals. They’ve never seen the strudel get made so they don’t know how many eggs need to be cracked, how fresh the butter must be, or how hard it is to roll the dough paper thin.

They’ve never seen staff sweating bullets to meet the next broadside or dodging the next shoe that drops. They’ve never considered the good intentions behind the occasional suboptimal outcome, and they haven’t slowed down to credit an ocean of right before drilling mile-deep to right a miniscule wrong.

Don’t shoot

As the constituent sits mashing laptop keys in self-righteous umbrage, probably while on the clock being paid to do their own job, their outrage building with each keystroke, do they consider that we are all in the same sinking boat? That, no matter how fast we work, a gallon of cold briny water floods in for every mugful we bail out?

When they call city workers lazy and incompetent, do they consider them human beings who are doing their best every day? Do they think of them as brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, parents and children, before assuming the worst and hurling epithets?

If most families have at least one dirty grey sheep in the family who is, in fact, lazy or incompetent or a living embodiment of the Peter Principle, so, admittedly, does any local government. Still, although many cities are hamstrung by a civil service code, a litigious society eager to kick “the man” in the nuts, and the political machinations of union leaders acting “on behalf” of their members, deadwood asleep at the wheel in local government often do have targets on their backs. Unfortunately, in government it can take years to fire someone for cause if they have tenure and representation, unlike in the private sector where they can be fired at will.

Working for you

Public servants often work 24–7; even after they leave the office, their work follows them home to invade their dinner tables and dreams. Many public servants kept showing up to work during the pandemic so essential services could continue, even as their constituents safely worked from home. The loudest complainers may not or will not see the cheerfully provided essential services that continue nonstop. If all goes well, a chorus of crickets sings hallelujah, but when something goes sideways, the backlash is swift and earsplitting.

Local government staff are doing their best and getting results despite daily firestorms. A national labor shortage impacts us all. Some in public service have looked at greener pastures, perhaps in the private sector where they’d never again having to endure casual abuse from people who claim they “pay your salary.” Many have already left and a few survivors do the work once done by many. The person complaining knows this. They may have just quit their own job or are considering it because no job — public or private sector — is easy.

As for “I pay your salary,” constituents don’t pay the salaries of public sector staff any more than retail customers pay the salary of the clerk who rings up their purchases. With several degrees of separation between taxpayer dollars and a local governnment’s general fund, which is also heavily supported by state and federal grant funding, most dollars upon which cities and counties depend to keep the lights on and snow plowed do not come directly from their residents.

Bus drivers battle bad weather, worse traffic, narrow streets, tree branches, too many red lights, people who cut them off, and cars blocking bus stops “for just a minute” as the their drivers load up or run in to grab their lattes. They are not paid nearly enough for the daily humiliations and abuse they endure in the driver’s seat, including racial slurs, assault, and fare evasion. People like Ms. Email-Missile Launcher may demand perfection, but the world, right now, is far from perfect.

Maybe the person driving your bus just lost his colleague to COVID. Maybe he’s scared the next passenger who gets on, “exercising” their “freedom” to be unvaccinated and unmasked will infect him, too, and he’ll take it home to his vulnerable family.

Maybe she didn’t come in this morning and never will again because enough is enough, while someone back at the bus yard is working overtime to patchwork enough people to cover her work.

Unless you look, you don’t see the choreography behind every civic service.

Trash collectors dodge cars, scooters, and dog walkers as they pick up trash and recyclables tossed in willy-nilly and all around the bins. They have to be on time, every time, even if pick-up day is a holiday they’d rather spend with their families, like that email sniper with the long-range scope, up there on her high horse shooting explosive rounds of complaints to their boss’s bosses and to elected officials.

God help local election staff. Even as they do their best every day in pursuit of democratic government, even as they work brutally long hours, triple-checking everything to make sure no one is disenfranchised, someone who won’t accept their guy’s election loss will accuse them of treason or worse.

Public servants work under these conditions because they are driven to help. So the next time you want to whip out your laptop and whip up your outrage to complain that a city service was delayed in a pandemic or act of God, think.

Then think again.

In good faith

I am not asking people to lower expectations or standards, or to stop holding public servants accountable. Hold them accountable, but with courtesy and in good faith, the same good faith with which most public servants serve each day. If they fall short, they will do everything possible to correct the issue — whether or not citizens ask nicely.

Would an email ambusher think it reasonable for a public servant to show up on their doorstep or to lob an email grenade accusing them of intentionally creating a safety hazard by not trimming a tree in their front yard? Of course not. There would be several attempts by local government to politely bring the matter to a citizen’s attention.

Would a city bus planning department suddenly reroute a bus line to an affluent neighborhood just because someone there demanded it? That doesn’t happen, because bus routes are carefully planned to provide service to as many as possible, particularly vulnerable populations.

Would a city worker ever email a citizen to tell them how to do their job, even though people regularly do that to them? No. Would they check the timestamp on a complainer’s email that obviously took an hour or more to write during work hours, then complain to the person’s boss? Never. Yet it’s commonplace for citizens to escalate perceived issues in local government straight to the mayor, the city manager, or higher.

If all people channeled their passion for excellence, not into outrage or blame, but into good faith support for their fellow humans, if more people were to act kindly, we might all get through these times sooner and saner.

Put down the accelerant

It may be too late to put out what is now a raging inferno of incivility. We’d have stood a better chance if we’d caught it as a spark, when it was a baby dragon’s tiny sneeze instead of a world engulfed in roaring flames. Still, we might start by each, individually, putting down the can of gasoline.

We can think before we hit send.