Our Hilltown reporter, H. Rose Schneider, was planning, as she always does, to cover this month’s Berne Town Board meeting. Last Wednesday, the day the meeting was scheduled, we started hearing from citizens who had seen an announcement posted on the town’s website, saying the meeting, which included two public hearings, was being postponed “due to recent safety and security concerns.”

They wanted to know what these concerns were. So did we.

We believe that, by finding out reasons and publishing them, we inform citizens and quell rumors. Postponing a meeting for safety concerns is unusual and citizens are entitled to know what those concerns are.

Schneider called Berne’s supervisor, Sean Lyons, who had made the decision to postpone. She asked him what the concerns were.

The most he would tell her was his decision was based on an incident that had occurred the day before, on Tuesday, regarding Wednesday’s meeting.

Had Lyons notified police about these concerns? No, he said, he was still “putting everything together.” He did say that he planned to contact police to increase security at Town Hall.

If a safety concern is strong enough to postpone two public hearings and the board’s monthly meeting, it seems it would merit a call to police. It also should merit an explanation for the public.

Why raise fears with such a posting on the town’s website and not explain what the concerns are? Such a tactic allows fears to grow.

Schneider then contacted each of the town board members. Only one — Joel Willsey — responded.

 Last month’s town board meeting had been heated after the board decided in a vote split along party lines — three Democrats to two Republicans — to censure Lyons, a Republican, over a number of actions he had taken without town-board input or approval, including amending a union contract.

At that meeting, Deputy Supervisor Dennis Palow, also a Republican, shouted, “If you keep talking crap about me, Joel, I’ve got something for you.”

The “crap” Palow was referencing were letters from Willsey to the Enterprise editor critical of Palow, Lyons, and Highway Superintendent Randy Bashwinger — all Republicans. Willsey is a Democrat along with two other town board members, Dawn Jordan and Karen Schimmer, who are not seeking reelection.

“When’s this going to happen?” Willsey asked Palow at the July town board meeting.

“It’s going to happen right here,” Palow replied.

 When Schneider asked Lyons if Tuesday’s incident was related to last month’s town board meeting, Lyons declined to comment.

So it’s our best guess that the “safety and security concerns” were over one council member losing his temper and threatening another.

Civil discourse is a cornerstone of a democracy that functions well. So is transparency.

We’d rather not have to make a supposition, of course; we’d rather the elected officials in Berne answered questions for the public they are meant to represent.

The thought that a board meeting has to be nixed, and that police have to be brought in for future meetings, all because a council member can’t control himself tells us that something is terribly wrong.

In the late 1700s, John Locke, in his “Essay Concerning Human Understanding” first distinguished between civil and philosophical discourse. 

By civil use, he wrote, “I mean such a communication of thoughts and ideas by words, as may serve for the upholding common conversation and commerce, about the ordinary affairs and conveniences of civil life, in the societies of men, one amongst another.”

The modern description of civil discourse that we like best is from Kenneth Gergen, psychology professor emeritus at Swarthmore College. Gergen’s work stresses the importance of human relationships in understanding self and reaching humankind’s potential. He famously commented — taking off from Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am” — “I am linked, therefore I am.”

Gergen writes that civil discourse requires respect of the other participants, that it neither diminishes the other’s moral worth, nor questions his good judgement.

Civil discourse requires humbleness and an appreciation for another’s viewpoints and experiences, Gergen asserts. It avoids excessive persuasion and direct antagonism. It eschews hostility.

These would be good rules for an elected board to follow. We try, on our newspaper’s opinion pages and in the posts readers make on our website, to follow these guidelines.

It’s good for members of a community to freely express their views. It is essential for elected board members to do so. Varied views leading to solid compromise move a democracy forward.

That is precisely what the Bill of Rights to our Constitution did. The amendments were written as a compromise to end the bitter debate that was waged for over a year on the ratification of our Constitution. They have guided us for more than two centuries.

In these modern United States, our elected leaders are not setting a good example of using civil discourse to understand differences and move forward with compromises.

The rhetoric coming from our president, Donald Trump, is divisive and hate-inspiring. We should not emulate it on the local level. Playing to a base does not allow a country, or a town, to move forward.

A recent paper, “The Trump Effect: How 2016 Campaign Rallies Explain Spikes in Hate,” looks at over 300 Trump campaign rallies from June 17, 2015 to Nov. 7, 2016, and measures the number of reported white supremacist propaganda, anti-Semitic incidents, and extremist behaviors that occurred both leading up to and directly following these campaign events.

The authors — Ayal Feinberg, an assistant professor at Texas A&M University, and Regina Branton and Valerie Martinez-Ebers, both professors at the University of North Texas — argue that Trump’s rhetoric and rallies heightened white identity and increased the perceived threat facing white Americans.

“Breaking norms of contemporary American political discourse, fiery speeches at these rallies often employed contentious language which, regardless of intention, closely mirrored narratives of prominent U.S. white nationalists and far-right extremist groups,” the authors write. 

While noting that correlation is not the same as causation, the researchers compare Trump-rally counties to non-Trump rally counties with similar demographics and conclude, “Utilizing a negative binomial regression model, we find that counties which hosted a Trump rally saw a 226% increase in hate-motivated incidents.”

Let that enormous increase sink in for a moment: A 226-percent jump in hate-motivated incidents.

Words matter. How our elected leaders express themselves reverberates throughout a community, throughout a country.

As Americans, we need to do better. And our local governments, close to home, are a good place to start. Our elected leaders need to honestly express their views — not to play to a base, but to move us forward. And before they open their mouths, they need to think through the tenets of civil discourse.

Each of us should do the same if we are to bridge the ever-widening divide in our nation. Before you speak, ask yourself: Is this antagonistic? Hostile? Am I diminishing my opponent’s moral worth or questioning his or her good judgment? Or, rather, am seeking to understand and value my opponent’s experiences and view? 

Only then will we move forward.