Rabbi Stephen Pearce, joined in San Francisco by an interfaith coalition, pleaded for civility and mediation instead of violence — just as news unfolded that two youths were on a killing spree at a Colorado high school.
Unaware of the massacre, Pearce and eight other clergy members spoke at a Tuesday afternoon press conference convened by the Interfaith Alliance Foundation, a nonpartisan educational organization.
But the timing could not have been more prescient.
“Civility seems to be on the wane,” the senior rabbi at San Francisco’s Congregation Emanu-El said at the conference. “Things like road rage and being impolite to other people is a sign of the times.”
After the conference, Pearce heard reports of the shooting, which left at least 15 people dead.
“This is the extreme of ending civility,” he said. “If you don’t like what’s going on, you get a gun and kill people. When you have a gripe, you solve it by taking the law into your own hands and killing people.”
Whether mediation could have prevented the tragedy in Littleton, Colo., is unanswerable. But Pearce said the concept of mediation has been largely abandoned by American society and that schools and religious institutions need to do a better job conveying the importance of civility and patience.
“Problems have to be solved immediately, to your satisfaction, so that it gives you some sense of revenge,” he said. “We aren’t teaching delayed satisfaction, so kids just go home and get a gun.”
Pearce related a series of steps in mediation suggested by a conference participant.
“Get to know people whose ideas may differ from your own. Listen respectfully to those whose rights you seek to abrogate. Figure out how to make the highest vision we have for society a reality. And acknowledge the bad in your own tradition.”
And, Pearce said, individuals must take personal responsibility for improving the world.
“Civil discourse should be geared to action. It’s nice to say we love each other, but can we really love when we are fighting over water, land, resources or anything that is limited?”
Pearce bemoaned the disappearance of school civics classes as one of many signs of the failure to educate kids about personal responsibility.
“The reality is that classes involving civility are not directed to working in a world with other human beings,” he said. “We need to learn how to be a member of society.”
He also said the interfaith alliance had previously discussed speaking on nonviolence in area schools but hadn’t acted on it.
Pearce thinks it’s time to bring the idea back.
“We need to look at a mediation group more carefully. What happened in Colorado is not the first and it’s not going to be the last.”