OUR VIEW: We need to recognize our own lack of manners

» Recent tasteless political discourse only reflects the norm in our culture.

Members of LaRouchePac.com recently camped out in front of the downtown post office and handed out literature voicing the group’s objection to health-care reform.

There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a controversial issue and people certainly have a right to oppose it and voice that opposition.

However, the group displayed a photo of President Obama with a Hitler moustache, presumably implying that the president is some kind of dictator who would ban all opposition and send millions of people of particular religions and ethnicities to their deaths.

The very facts that Suzanne Rose and Gene Schenk of Leesburg could display such a photo on a downtown street 70 miles from the capital and they haven’t disappeared yet tells us that perhaps their implication is a little overstated.

But there’s a bigger issue.

It’s illustrated by a congressman who loudly interrupts the president during a speech to call him a liar. It includes another congressman who states that the Republican health care plan consisted of two words: “die quickly.” When called upon for an apology, he apologizes to the dead and his House speaker defends him while blasting the interrupting congressman.

It is probably best illustrated by the people who screamed their lungs out at all of the town hall meetings on health care nationwide this summer. Many people expressed outrage over that, but a lot of those who were so outraged were yelling pretty loudly at President Bush just a year or two ago.

All of this reflects a rudeness that we may not want to accept, but it’s firmly ingrained in our culture.  Just turn on the TV for proof.

We can blame politicians or talk show hosts, but in the end, we elect those politicians and watch or listen to those talk shows. They are simply a microcosm of our society as a whole.

So as we look into the mirror and see something we don’t like, we have to decide what, if anything, we’re going to do about it. We can start by treating people with a little more respect — even those with whom we disagree. Who knows? Maybe a few kids pick up on that respect and the next generation turns out to be much more civil than we’ve been.