A week ago, I spoke at 1350 Main Street in downtown Sarasota, as the guest of the Democratic Club of Sarasota. The turnout was fantastic — maybe 80 people, which was so great to see. And, more importantly, the people in the audience were very engaged listeners and contributed to the after-talk dialogue.

As usual, many people disagreed with my points — that Facebook is the devil, that incivility is a bottom-up, not top-down problem (i.e., the nastiness of our pundits and politicians is only a reflection of the generally pervasive incivility among us regular folk — oh, and greed too, since fireworks fuel big bucks), and that the only true, decent, and lasting way to combat incivility is with civility. In other words, kill the opposition with kindness. (That doesn’t sound too civil!).

This last argument perhaps generated the most interesting and heated debate during the after-discussion. People earnestly debated the pros and cons of returning “fire” with “water” — which was the premise of my talk. I don’t believe in letting people walk all over you, (or even walk on a part of you), but I also believe that returning fire with fire only has one result: everybody’s house gets burned down.

Big thanks to the Dem Club and to the people who came out last Tuesday night to talk civility.