Category Archives: Civil Discourse

The Craft Police

adult learning, art, Civil Discourse, creativity,

I grew up doing arts and crafts. It was part of my world. My grandmother taught me to crochet. Counted cross stitch and quilling were popular with my friends. Every Christmas, I completed ornament kits. Fifty years later, I still put them on my tree.

As I move into retirement, I have made arts and crafts a priority. Over the past two years, I have helped create two monthly craft groups. Having a community of supportive crafters has provided motivation for trying new activities and honing my skills in others.

My daily creative work takes places in a hybrid planner/art journal that I have designed over the past year. It is a mash up of bullet-journal style monthly and weekly layouts along with junk journal and collage pages. For 2026, I am using single-month journals with brown covers and dotted pages: literal blank journals where I can design and create the layouts and tracking pages that work for me. I have included a couple examples.

Junk Journal

I have learned a lot about styles and setups for these kinds of journals from various accounts on social media. I joined a couple of Facebook groups devoted to junk journaling specifically. They were full of helpful information and wonderful examples. But, there was a dark side as well. Group leaders felt the need to carefully define the practice. Commenters were not always as diplomatic as they might be. Posters began requesting that people be kind when they shared their efforts. General questions were often seen as critical rather than curious; users were directed to Google to learn more before they dared to engage. Commenters began arguing with each other over the content of their comments.

It is a little funny, really. At its core, junk journaling is about gluing stuff down. Margarete Miller, a crafting blogger, says there are no rules. I have no plans to share my journal with the Facebook groups as I am not interested in critique. I do this for me: it is creative and mindful and fun. I do share with my craft groups. We may do a bit of critiquing, but mostly we enjoy looking at what each of us has created. I get a kick out of looking at past journals myself, remembering where I was, what was going on, when I made any particular page.

Mostly, though, the group dynamics are sad. Many people never try arts or crafts because they don’t think they are artistic. Faced with a blank page and told to be creative, they are paralyzed by their inner critic. Junk journaling should be the perfect beginner practice to combat that fear, as you are, again, gluing stuff down. However, by creating some ideal way to glue stuff down and pressuring people into opening their work to potential public ridicule, these groups end up destroying any potential meditative impacts of the practice. In fact, they add to the anxiety that junk journaling was meant to help alleviate.

I was reminded of a clip from The West Wing that shows these kinds of hostile spaces have been part of the Internet almost since the beginning. The website referenced in the clip was real. Aaron Sorkin, who created and wrote the series, joined the group and almost immediately got into trouble with the message board denizens. As much as things change, people tend to stay the same.

A Sunday Story

Civil Discourse, community, thinking out loud,

Prologue: I have been trying to put some words together about life right now. I am not sure I make a clear point but am going to press publish anyway. And, warning, this is not an optimistic post but a culmination of a week of observation and rumination as I figure out how to move forward.

Yesterday, the Universe played one of her pranks: I had to attend church. I have joined a handbell choir that practices at a nearby United Methodist Church, and we were part of the service. The choir itself is ecumenical so there is no expectation of joining the church, and no one has asked me to attend even as they are welcoming and grateful for my participation. I love playing handbells, an activity that requires other people. And since it usually happens within some religious connection, it means going to church.

My home denomination is United Methodist so the order of service was very comfortable although very different from the services I have been attending with my parents at their retirement community. There were lots of young families, and it was clear the congregation was thriving, contrary to reports in the wider media. These young families were the next generation of several generations of ancestors who had chosen to bloom where they were planted. I happened to be there on All Saints Sunday, and the service began with the readings of those who had passed over those generations. That meant, in my small rural community, there were many shared last names.

I was a little worried, to be honest, as, other than those retirement community chapel services, I haven’t been to church for a long time, despite having been an active member of several congregations as an adult. It was utterly my fault as even the Unitarian Universalists eventually were a bit too much organized religion for me, but that’s a story for another time.

I have thought a lot about the Sunday service: they celebrated veterans and ancestors, which included children from the church’s pre-school marching and gesturing to God Bless America. Everyone was filming with their cell phones, more like a school concert than church service. There was loud applause throughout the service. (In case you weren’t aware, clapping in church is a hot controversy, evidenced by a quick Google search. The UUs tended toward hand or bulletin waving but had never made a strict policy as was their way.)

The patriotic singing and flag waving might have been concerning had it not been Veteran’s Day. Otherwise, there were no politics, no seeming celebration or gloating, and the sermon, all of five minutes, focused on Jesus’s command in Matthew 22: 36-40 to love your God and love your neighbor. The title–Who is my neighbor?–was a little misleading as the youngish minister, dressed informally in jeans and a striped shirt, focused more on the fact that God loves you and you should love others. That was it. I had sort of looked forward to hearing what he had to say about the answer to his question in light of recent events.

But trying to find an answer gets pretty messy, pretty quickly, and I think was beyond the scope of a simple Sunday service if recent responses to Dan Harris’s post on Instagram are any indication. Harris has been posting clips of last week’s Q&A on Instagram, with many of the questions expressing concern for the election outcome and what it means for the future, from anger to fear to despair. The responses on social media show that there is NO common ground, and while my sympathies may lie with those who are struggling, the posts and replies from both sides are often blunt, bordering on rude, with a side of name calling for good measure. One side says get over it, you are being dramatic. The other side gives reasons for their fear. I know social media doesn’t represent everyone and tends towards these extremes, but the rhetoric itself shows a callousness towards others that has only grown over time and is often what drives media coverage of our country.

It is this divisiveness that I fear the most. When we can’t wrestle with theological questions about the meaning of loving your neighbor but resort to simple aphorisms, when we can’t disagree with each other without demonizing the other side, we are on a downward spiral.

Once Upon a Time

Civil Discourse, history, thinking out loud, ,

I was starting my sophomore year at The College of William and Mary in the fall of 1981 and would have, in my earnest, innocent way, identified as a feminist. That year, the annual speakers’ forum opened with a debate about the Equal Rights Amendment, featuring Phyllis Schlafly, founder of STOP ERA, and Karen DeCrow, former President of the National Organization for Women, a group which advocated for passage of the ERA, among other things.*

I have a clear memory of sitting on the bleachers in William and Mary Hall listening to these two women debate each other, something that, in and of itself was a bit unusual in my experience thus far. I suppose it was seen as “women’s issue” so women were permitted to talk about it. I don’t remember much, except being surprised to find that Schlafly was thoughtful, even compelling, in her beliefs, (despite disagreeing vehemently with everything she said) and that both women remained civil to each other throughout the evening. No name calling, no shouting over each other.

The report (see page 2) from The Flat Hat, the college paper, indicates the audience mostly sided with DeCrow, wearing ERA Now and .59¢ buttons, the latter referencing the fact that, at the time, women made 59 cents to every dollar a man made. That gap has closed, and is now, according to the US Department of Labor, 83.7 cents. I discovered that there is a “holiday” in March each year to commemorate the fact that it takes women 15 months to earn what men do in 12 months. This gap, of course, widens when it comes to women of color.

Political issues aside, I titled this post “once upon a time” because there *was* a time, in the past, when people who disagreed could be on the same stage together to describe and defend their ideas in a civil way, to give listeners a chance to hear and evaluate those ideas and use them to form their own opinions, perhaps becoming more nuanced by being exposed to the other side. Civil discourse seems to be a thing of the past, and I am not sure it is something we can get back.

*I am grateful to The College of William and Mary’s digital archive for access to The William and Mary News and The Flat Hat. I was able to confirm the date of the debate and read the follow up review to refresh my sometimes faulty memory.

If You Can’t Say Something Nice…

Civil Discourse

Even as I start typing this, I realize it’s probably a waste of bandwidth; after all, I’m not saying anything we don’t all know: the Internet tends to be a pretty uncivil place. In fact, it seems to breed incivility as though it is a mark of honor to be the first to post something negative or ugly.

But, as I read the first comment on this Lifehacker post about making ice cream in coffee cans, I heard my mother’s voice speaking through the ether: if you can’t say something nice, then don’t say anything at all. This was usually in response to something mean I had said about my older sister or perhaps a smart alecky reply to a simple question. Now, it echoes loudly as we live in a world that seems to celebrate saying mean stuff for no apparent reason other than because you can.

This ice cream quote is a pretty minor example, but it demonstrates that even the most inoffensive posts can garner negative comments, a chance to be sarcastic the way I was with my mother. A friend on Facebook posted something about Garrison Keillor and I was surprised at the vehemence and strong language used by one of his friends to describe Keillor. Just ugly, ugly language and there was no way to avoid it as I scanned my news feed. It was like your crazy uncle who said inappropriate things at the dinner table and then looked around grinning to see if anyone would call him on it.

I worry that these every day examples make us less sensitive to the larger examples. For instance, the news this week revolved around the Cheerios commercial that features a mixed race couple. The YouTube version had to have comments turned off because they were so ugly and racist. I find myself wondering if these really were people who were against mixed marriage or if the hate speech was just more of the same Internet invective without any real beliefs behind it…a chance to say bad words and ugly things because there isn’t any accountability?

I worry that we have come to expect and accept that this is part of the world and I don’t have any answers for how to solve it: unfriend people? reply back with kindness? engage in constructive dialog? I’m sorry to say that I have a sense that none of those things will work but simply up the ante on the original poster: you though that was bad, I can be much worse!

I wish I had a nice closing paragraph with the tidy solution…anyone? anyone? Have you dealt with this in some productive way or do you just press delete or unfriend?

The Wisdom of John Adams

Civil Discourse, history, politics

The horrid events in Arizona are the talk of the Sunday morning news shows. We all pray for Gabrielle Giffords and her family and for all Americans and do hope that it may be the moment when we look for a new way to work together where we can have honest disagreements with others without having to demonize or destroy them.

I’m reading David McCullough’s biography of John Adams and I have new found respect for this great American leader. I find myself marking the pages with quotes and ideas that are still relevant today. He would have been very sad about the state of civility in our country because respect was essential for a successful government:

We may please ourselves with the prospect of free and popular governments. But there is great danger that those governments will not make us happy. God grant they may. But I fear that in every assembly, members will obtain an influence by noise not sense. By meanness, not greatness. By ignorance, not learning. By contracted hearts, not large souls…There is one thing, my dear sir, that must be attempted and most sacredly observed or we are all undone. There must be decency and respect, and veneration introduced for persons of authority of every rank, or we are undone. In a popular government, this is our only way.