The Cardinal Way: Civility Rules
Cardinal News has been selected by the American Press Institute Project to participate in a nationwide project to promote civic discourse. We are partnering with the Roanoke Collaboration Project to give people in our demographically and politically changing communities the tools to engage in constructive dialogue.
We may agree to disagree on issues, but we are hoping that we can do so without becoming disagreeable. At the end of the day, we seek to remember that there is more to our neighbors than their political yard signs and that we might even find common ground on which we all can stand.
We will try this experiment for a few months. If successful, we will continue through the 2024 election cycle so that our community can emerge from what is expected to be a trying political year.
Please read the featured essays, and then take part in an informal survey. We will publish new essays every other week with the survey results and comments in the intervening weeks.
Featured articles
Cardinal Way collection of civil debate
Civility is required for success in government
With nearly half its members entering the Senate for the first time, the 2024 session represents a unique opportunity to restore civility in the General…
People don’t ‘magically switch sides like a WWF wrestler based on you quoting a statistic’
Readers offer insights into how to calm a difficult political conversation. Another in our special project on civility.
How to defuse a political argument at the Thanksgiving table
We can’t model our dinnertime conversations after cable news programming.
Uncle Joe’s crazy rant is not a threat, and you can’t fix it
Dana Ackley is an expert in building emotional quotient (EQ) skills and the author of “The EQ Leader Program Manual.” Here’s his perspective on Thanksgiving.
We are ‘hiding behind social media identities so that we don’t have to be civil’
That’s one of the responses we got to our original installment of a project on restoring civility.
Each of us has the power to bridge the great partisan divide
The Cardinal Way: Civility Rules is an experiment to see if people in our part of Virginia can lower the heat and talk about hot-button…
We’re dangerously polarized as a nation. That won’t be fixed locally.
Today we embark on a project to promote civility called The Cardinal Way: Civility Rules. It’s an experiment to see if people in our part…