How long has society been whipping itself into frenzies? The answer could well be “forever,” but in my lifetime, I’ve never seen anything quite like the discourse presently afflicting North America as well as much of the rest of the world. We’ve always had passionate debates around political issues. It’s the language and the volume and a growing shift to the far right that worry me. The language is vile. The volume is deafening. The outcomes could be dire. I’ve been thinking about this, perhaps, too much. But here’s my short and incomplete history of the development of over-the-top, shall we say, self-expression.

First, we got the Internet, which in one provides the good, the bad and the very, very ugly. Yes, it allows us to speak to each other directly. Yes, there is endless information available to all. Unfortunately, it also divides us into “rooms” where we’re preaching, largely, to the choir. Not a good environment for balanced debate and diversity. And then we get to the very ugly, where international autocrats try to (and may well be succeeding in) perverting the course of democracy. Facebook, for example, became a big thing right around the time Barack Obama was elected president of the United States. Two terms later, we had Donald Trump. This did not, alone, draw a direct line from a decent Democrat’s rule to an insurrectionist, but it didn’t help.

Add to that the financial crisis of 2008-09, which slapped the American dream across the face, and then the COVID-19 pandemic, and you see some of the factors burbling at the putative beginnings of all this . . . meanwhile churning away on social media. Some of the, ah, rhetoric I find profoundly offensive. Some time ago, this also came to Canada. For example, I am seeing a great many posts comparing our prime minister to the monster Adolf Hitler. It’s not just bizarre, it’s disgusting. I’m not here to defend Justin Trudeau, rather feeling that you either like or dislike his policies, or a mixture of both, and of course that is everyone’s prerogative. But this comparison is obscene, and not just on the Canadian political front. It reduces the experience, the ongoing family trauma, and the historical obscenity and weight of the Holocaust as well. Furthermore, we still live in a democracy. Trudeau, for any of his faults, can not be described as a dictator. For anyone who would like to test the difference, I would ask them to try living in Russia, where Vladimir Putin just “won” a fifth term for six years.

 In an environment where we are also facing the strong possibility of Trump re-entering the White House, shrieking as he is of dictatorship and “bloodbaths” — either in the auto industry or in general, depending on your interpretation — it’s time to take some deep breaths and reconsider what it means to live here. Because this kind of ugliness may be coming to our municipal election this November. I hope not. But some signs are there. Phil Tank of The StarPhoenix, for example, recently reported on a website and Facebook page called A Better YXE. I won’t get into the finer details; those are his. But I have been to these sites, and I am not entirely but largely appalled at some of the conversation on the FB page. Constant questions are being asked by the anonymous administrators of the page. (By the way, why anonymous? What do you have to hide?) Questions include, for example, where should the bike lanes be? Should we be spending a fortune on a new arena? Are taxes too high?

Well, you can probably imagine some of the responses. One of the milder ones, for instance, suggests city council should be fired. Um, dude, it doesn’t work that way in a democracy. Be sure to vote, OK? Fortunately, some reasonable citizens are weighing in, ostensibly to add sanity to the discussion. One commentator noted that having concerns is valid, but perhaps less so “the hyperbolic language that you use to express those concerns. The ‘over the top’ outrage, the excessive use of catch phrases.” I couldn’t have said that better, so thank you, citizen of Saskatoon. I hear the same sort of yelling from our provincial government and from the leader of the federal Conservatives. It’s pervasive. I wonder where all of this is going, with a churning stomach. I’m tempted to ask everyone to just shut up (like they would), but that doesn’t work either. Debate and conversation must happen. But could we please stop throwing every rock sitting so temptingly at our feet? Thank you.

 One of the lessons of history is beware the buffoon, but when every day is so bizarre and distracting, those lessons are hard to remember. And each day brings us closer to forgetting what normal used to look like. — Julian Borger, The Guardian’s correspondent in Washington, on June2, 2020, in a commentary on Donald Trump. Borger is now the UK paper’s world affairs editor

-Joanne Paulson