I heard on the news that a friend of mine was murdered recently in her home in Troy.
You just don't expect to hear a friend's name in conjunction with a death being investigated by the Major Case Squad.
It was reported that she was brutally stabbed multiple times. Her husband was subsequently charged with first-degree murder. What could drive someone to that kind of rage?
Real-life murders usually seem so far away. We don't expect them to happen in our neighborhood or to our friends.
Our American political landscape has become toxic as well, spreading into conversations among families and friends. Relationships are destroyed because people can't simply agree to disagree. Everything is seen as black or white, and people on the opposite side are seen as the enemy.
Ira Glass of National Public Radio's "This American Life" tells of a study by Peter Coleman of Columbia University regarding inflammatory rhetoric surrounding the 1994 bombing of an abortion clinic in Brookline, Mass.
People on both sides of the issue were angry. They feared their opponents, thinking them evil or insane. So the governor and the archdiocese called three leaders from each movement together. They met in secret because, in their minds, it was dangerous to be seen with "the enemy."
They agreed to certain guidelines. Even then, the conversations were difficult. Glass said they "knew the talking points and it was hard to put them away." He indicated people often organize their entire identities around a conflict. He said that of all international disputes since 1816, conflicts lasted an average of 36 years and accounted for half of all wars between nations and three-fourths of civil wars.
In situations such as this, a disruptive event can shake everything up, or long-term changes can result in each side being more open to getting along and less violence.
In this particular case, the women got to know each other over a six-year period and started looking at each other as decent people instead of villains. A decade later, three of the participants the researchers spoke with said it had been a life-changing experience. One said that before the experience, she was unable to converse with her opponent while they were in a room together awaiting a TV interview. After the experience, they were able to acknowledge each other publicly, which was a big step.
"We're never going to move the issue forward if we don't talk about it in a civilized way publicly," she said.
The women's viewpoints, however, became more polarized. The act of explaining their reasoning in a group forced them to crystallize their views. So even though they cared deeply, they still had a difference of opinion.
Coleman says the experiment was a success because the rhetoric changed. It lost its edge and vitriol.
Cassandra Dahnke is co-founder of the Institute for Civility in Government, a nonpartisan Houston-based group that stages civility workshops. An NPR story by Linton Weeks about Gabrielle Giffords quotes Dahnke as saying, "A lack of civility drives people from the conversation, and cripples the collaborative processes needed for a healthy democracy to endure. Without civility, we may be speaking at one another, but we are not necessarily speaking with one another, and if we cannot speak with one another, we can scarcely accomplish much else." Dahnke says, "We aren't expecting people to always agree, nor would we want them to be anything less than passionate about their positions. But a person should not have to resort to rudeness, hostility and/or falsehood to make a reasoned point."
So I would like to propose a new resolution for 2012: conflict resolution. Let's try to make this year different. Let's change our rhetoric, have civil conversations, and end the senseless violence.
Karen Fox Clark of Lake Saint Louis is a piano teacher and leads an adoption support group. Opinion Shapers are chosen annually to write columns on topics of interest to them.
