It was early on a Wednesday morning in Seattle, and 14 bleary-eyed high school students were sitting in a fluorescent-lit University of Washington classroom, donuts and oranges in hand, discussing the morality of China’s social policies.

One of their coaches, Noah Zeichner, read a prompt aloud: “On June 14, 2014, China’s State Council announced a plan to establish a social credit system.” It was, he explained, a kind of personal Yelp score — administered by the government to determine whether people were virtuous enough to receive a home loan or travel on an airplane.

The students considered the experimental policy with more far open-mindedness than you’d probably find on Facebook or TV news. “We can’t take out loans here in the U.S. if we don’t have good credit,” noted Dillen Abbe, a brown-haired senior in a trenchcoat. With any government, “citizens agree to give up some liberties in order to create a better functioning society,” said Sonia Yuan, a petite 11th grader. “This is an issue of security versus liberty,” said Robin Truax, an enthusiastic junior. It was technically a vacation day, but these teens were engaged in a head-on ethics scrimmage and they needed to get it right — not just the argument, but the tone.

Coaches encourage rational, emotion-free conversations about tough topics. Teens who express gratitude win extra points.

For an American teenager today, there are precious few examples of positive, collaborative civil discourse in online media or the entertainment industry. But for motivated high school students in Seattle, there’s the High School Ethics Bowl, a six-year-old competition sponsored by the University of Washington’s Center for Philosophy for Children. One of the first events of its kind in America, the Ethics Bowl is similar to a high school debate or Model UN competition, but with a twist: Rather than arguing against the opposing team, the competition centers around who can best engage in civil discourse. Coaches encourage civil, rational, emotion-free conversations about tough topics. Teens who express gratitude win extra points. It’s even considered cool when you identify logical fallacies and then change your mind altogether.

“It’s not an intense, in-your-face argument. It’s more like, ‘Let’s explore all of the possibilities,’” says Zeichner, a social studies and Spanish teacher at Ingraham High School in Seattle. “Both teams might end up agreeing on their position, but they really have to make sure they’re not leaving out any considerations. It’s an exercise in critical thinking.”

Back in the classroom, Zeichner’s Ingraham High School ethics team sat across from a group of Rainier Beach High School students. They would spend the morning engaging in several rounds of civil discourse about a number of ethical issues. Every year, scrimmages and practices like this occur during the fall and winter months, eventually culminating in the Ethics Bowl itself. At the competition, more than 100 local high school students from both private and public schools join judges, lawyers, faculty from the University of Washington, and graduate and undergraduate ethics students to compete for the title of Ethics Bowl champions.

During a typical Ethics Bowl competition or scrimmage, teams of five work together to identify the many different perspectives that could come into play during an ethical dilemma. Each round involves looking at two ethical dilemmas out of a possible 10, some hypothetical and some realistic — involving such issues as workplace disputes, liver donation, gun control, using private funding in academic institutions, and social media use.

Judges determine the winners based on a detailed scoring rubric that prioritizes civil discourse, changing one’s mind, and close listening. Judges consider questions like: “Did the team clearly and systematically identify and thoroughly discuss the case’s central ethical dimensions?” and “Did the presentation indicate awareness and thoughtful consideration of different viewpoints, including those likely to loom large in the reasoning of individuals who disagree with the team’s position?” Teams also receive points for giving insightful commentary on the other team’s presentation, and for respectful engagement in a productive discussion.

The University of Washington’s Center for Philosophy for Children was founded nearly 23 years ago by Jana Mohr Lone, a lawyer who left her practice to become a philosophy graduate student — and, eventually, a philosophy professor. Lone was inspired by the way her own children asked big questions about the world, so she started to think about how she could offer a sense of confidence and wonder to the kids in her community, too. Eventually the UW Center for Philosophy for Children was born; in 2014, the Ethics Bowl followed.

“I believe that the more all of us can do this, the less we will feel like we are separate from one another.”

Today, the center offers ethics-based programming for nearly everyone. Lone and her colleagues hold trainings, workshops, and seminars for local teachers who want to bring more philosophy into their classrooms. Philosophers-in-residence visit local schools a few times each week, mentoring teachers and students. Lone even launched a series of ethics workshops for parents after getting positive feedback from students’ families; they saw how their kids took a more level-headed view of the world’s most divisive topics and asked how they could get involved, too.

These programs are rooted in deeply-academic philosophical theories, but they’re also designed to teach children — and adults — that deep thinking matters, especially during a politically divisive time in American history. Recent research shows that Gen Z will grow up with more access to technology and less face-to-face human interaction than any generation in history. Depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation rates have skyrocketed for American teens between the ages of 12 and 17, a finding that some social psychologists tie to the rise of social media. Add to this the fact that today’s news is full of cruel language and ad hominem attacks, and you have a recipe for continued discord.

“It’s becoming harder and harder to have real exchanges with people who think differently from you,” Lone says, “so I believe that the more all of us can do this, the less we will feel like we are separate from one another.”

A timer rang loudly in the middle of the scrimmage. Quickly, the Ingraham team members completed their assessment of the case. Then they leaned back, breathless and proud, looking across at their opponents. The Rainier Beach team presented a rebuttal. The Ingraham students conferred and offered gratitude to their competitors before responding. In the end, neither team declared the Chinese policy fully good or bad. (Teams are allowed to take sides but are encouraged to think more broadly about the problems at hand; in ethics, as in real life, there are rarely just two answers.) Instead, they presented every pro and con argument they could think of.

Finally, both teams engaged in a five-minute segment of civil discourse. In a few instances, they disagreed with one another politely, but their discussion never devolved into the snarky, divisive interaction that’s common on cable news. The students ended the practice round on an emotion-free, curious note.

This back-and-forth is a hallmark of the Ethics Bowl, and even the coaches sometimes marvel at the judgment-free interaction. “You’re bringing together students from very different backgrounds: We have high-income and low-income kids, private school and public school students,” says Zeichner. “You’re putting them together to discuss pretty controversial topics. They are pushed in this competition to engage as civilly as possible even if they fiercely disagree. How can they show that they are really hearing the other side?”

Zeichner and Lone both say this way of thinking seems to trickle down into students’ personal lives beyond the competition, too. “One of the things that is inspiring about the Ethics Bowl is to watch students who start with a particular point of view,” says Lone. “Then they take in what the other team has said and think on their feet about how that might change their perspective.”

At the end of the 2019 season, neither team from the scrimmage won the Ethics Bowl. Ingraham made it to the semifinals, then lost to Chief Sealth High School, which went on to win the entire competition. But winning seemed to matter less than expected, at least for the Ingraham team. “Hopefully next year we can break that cycle [of losing], and I’m confident we’ll be able to if we continue working as we have,” said Yuan.

No matter who wins, Lone believes the atmosphere of the Ethics Bowl keeps students, judges, and coaches coming back every year; it’s a hopeful event that feels less fraught than the world beyond the competition’s doors. Yuan agrees: “The sheer amount of brain power means that there’s always something to learn from another person, be it a judge or a member of the opposing team,” she says.

If there is any hope for an increasingly divisive political system, it may be found at the High School Ethics Bowl. And Lone suggests that the magic comes from taking the time to wonder deeply about the big issues facing today’s world — with the open-mindedness of a young person who hasn’t fully learned how to be cynical about communication.

“Kids often get the idea that wondering is a waste of time and they shouldn’t spend time thinking about what it means to be a person, or the point of life,” Lone says. “But it’s important to keep wondering about the mysteries of the world. It’s part of the joy of being a human being.”

Published on April 10, 2019

On my first day teaching English as a Second Language students in Texas four years ago, a student asked me was if I was going to vote for Donald Trump. I was new to ESL, but not to teaching; nosy teenagers were old hat. But before I could give my standard response — I don’t discuss politics with students — he continued: “because if he’s elected president, he’s going to deport me and my parents.”

He was in the seventh grade. I remember being stunned that he would share such personal information, but as I look back on that conversation, I am most shocked by the ease with which he said it. It wasn’t a new problem or a new thought. He had been told about it. Followed it on TV. Talked with his parents about it. At 12.

Immigration is a hot topic right now, but it’s far removed from most people’s everyday lives. They tweet and retweet in reaction to the policies that come from the White House or Congress. They talk about whether walls are good border security, about “caravans” marching north. They watch the news in horror or glee, depending on the day and their point of view.

When I think of immigration in the U.S., I see the faces of the young men and women who populate my classroom on the outskirts of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. For them, immigration policy is a more intimate companion, one who cannot take the hint and leave the party.

This is their thing. They get to feel how they feel, and like every other teenager in the world, they feel A LOT.

After two years at the local junior high, I began teaching and coordinating the ESL program at the high school. In my classroom, with its word charts and agendas and notebooks strewn everywhere, we are concerned mostly with learning and refining English, passing graduation tests, and helping with the ins and outs of a rural public high school. Like any special population in American education, my students come with an exorbitant amount of paperwork to keep track of growth, discipline issues, and attendance problems. In most ways, our days are full of the mundane everyday-ness of school life. We don’t go out of our way to discuss the president’s policies or what’s happening in the news.

Nevertheless, the news rears its head. Recently, I asked students to brainstorm things they were scared of, then share their answers on the board. Someone in every class referenced ICE and the threat of deportation, either for them or their parents. It is a constant, nagging worry for them. So we do not run from it. I don’t act like my opinion matters. This is their thing. They get to feel how they feel, and like every other teenager in the world, they feel A LOT.

Many share their worries not in front of a class full of peers but in whispered conversations or entries in their class journals. Early in the 2017 school year, I asked one queasy-looking child if he felt ill. “I’m a Dreamer, Miss,” he responded.

Nothing else needed to be said. This young man and his family had registered with the government, hoping and praying that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program would provide a path to citizenship, or at least legal residence. But the night before, the Trump administration had announced that DACA was going to be discontinued, and suddenly my student felt like a sitting duck. He’d made his illegal status known. Would they be coming to get him? Would they come to school? No, I assured him. School is a safe place. Relieved, he returned to working on a paper for his English class, and I was left feeling overwhelmed. How is it possible to concentrate on academics and language acquisition amidst this kind of anxiety?

It’s possible because my students and their families are determined. They do not take the privilege of an American education lightly. They work hard in their classes. They are respectful to teachers. They participate in sports and JROTC and band. They are constantly working with flashcards and asking me how to pronounce things. They are normal teenagers, so they also get into trouble and can be a lot to handle. But together, we have etched out a place where they are loved, understood, and encouraged. I do not ask about their immigration status, because it is not my concern. I do not take lightly the trust they and their parents have shown in me.

When they need help, they ask for it, and I try to offer what assistance I can, whether it’s for the parent whose child is brilliant and should go to college but didn’t qualify for DACA and has no papers, or the young man who desperately wants to join the Marines and needs help filling out the forms for enlistees without papers.

Of course, we’re in rural Texas. I’m sure some teachers, like many local residents, hold hardline positions on immigration. But the ones I know here are educators first, and they have always sought to help our English learners in whatever way they can. Our schools have embraced the immigrant community with open arms.

When I first started as ESL Coordinator, I was prepared to go to battle on behalf of my students. I envisioned confronting conservatives in the faculty or community who were too focused on their political views to see my students as people. I thought I might have to fight for administrative support.

Thankfully, I’ve never had to fight any of those battles. Our students aren’t talking points in a debate. No matter what our viewpoints, our top priority is to provide a safe place for them for seven hours a day, to help them flourish and grow. That’s hard enough. And it’s the best way I know to fight for them.

Published on February 13, 2019

Here are some of the charges levied against me: I am a “libtard” and “Commie,” or sometimes, a mere “socialist.” I’m a supporter of Sharia law and a fan of “screwy louie farakan.” [sic] I consider Barack Obama the “Holy prophet Hussein savior of Iran.”

All this, and much more, comes via Facebook — from a friend. His name is Ross Friedman, though in the rock music world, he is known by his longtime moniker “Ross the Boss.” For decades, Ross was lead guitarist in the proto-punk/hard rock band The Dictators. He also co-founded the power metal outfit Manowar, and now fronts the Ross the Boss Band. He’s made 31 albums in his 65 years.

I met Ross, a Bronx native, in 1977. He was fresh off a gig with the Dictators in Bangor, Maine, and I was writing a feature on the band for a music magazine. That night, we indulged in all sorts of rock ‘n’ roll mayhem and merriment, ending with a 4 a.m. breakfast at Denny’s. In the decades since, I covered and hung out with the band many times — and always found Ross to be spirited onstage, happy-go-lucky after the show, full of sweaty hugs and good cheer.

Skip ahead to the 21^st century. Enter Hillary and Trump. Enter social media. Exit civility.

And enter a new phase of my relationship with Ross, who is now my most prominent, irritating, and antagonizing Facebook correspondent. In the virtual world, my friend has become — how to put this gently — a troll.

I wanted to learn how it happened.

Our conflict, I realized, is not precisely about politics, something Ross and I never discussed in all our years of hanging out. It’s more about behavior. Ross never references his political views when he plays in concert. On his own Facebook page, he posts almost exclusively about music.

But there’s an “other” Ross who festers, flames, and fulminates on other people’s home page posts and in private messages, peddling vitriolic right-wing memes and gifs, crappy jokes, and the occasional link to the Daily Caller. Some of our Facebook friends-in-common, who tend to be Democrats like me, curse him or goad him. Ross smacks back with his arsenal of memes, cliched insults, and links to dubious websites. He owns a batting facility in Queens called The Cage, and often fires away from behind the counter on his iPad, acting the part of what one pal calls an “inappropriate friend.”

Some people shrug him off; others block him. That latter group includes Cheetah Chrome, guitarist with a punk band called Dead Boys, and one of Ross’s closest real-world friends for more than 40 years.

For a while, Cheetah told me, he enjoyed sparring with Ross on Facebook — these two polar opposites from the punk rock world, putting on a heated performance with the written word.

“When people could see it, it was more fun. It got pretty amusing at times,” he said. But the act wore thin, or at least one-sided.

“It got to where he was bombarding me with all these right-wing memes, and I was deleting, like, ten things a day. It was borderline harassment,” Cheetah said. “It got to be kind of a microcosm of how the country’s gotten these days.”

Yet their online conflicts never spilled into the real world.

“When I see him in person, we’ll be fine. We always are,” Cheetah said. They talk guitars, music, and family. Politics goes unmentioned.

“I’m trying to be abrasive. Why not? You’re expecting it. It would be boring if everybody had the same view.”

Curious about the roots of this online Ross noise, I reached out to his former Dictators bandmates, all of whom have blocked or unfriended him. My questions: Was he a volatile extreme right-winger back in the day? And if so, how did you relate to him?

None of them — guitarist Scott Kempner, songwriter/bassist Andy Shernoff, drummer J.P. “Thunderbolt” Patterson, singer Handsome Dick Manitoba — could remember Ross talking politics, in the band or out.

“Years ago I never ever saw a snippet of that,” Manitoba said.

“He loved heavy metal, The Beatles, B.B. King, The Who, and his guitar,” Kempner agreed. “I try and remember that when I see Ross going off on that stuff.”

“He did tell me he posts to get a rise out of people,” Shernoff said.

At this point, I needed to hear from Ross himself. When did he become a true believer? Or did he believe at all? So I called him on the phone. I thought we’d drop some of the latent hostility if we talked live, and I was correct. On the other end of the line was the cheerful Ross I remembered, more thoughtful and philosophical than his irascible online self. 

“I never was political,” he told me. “I was too busy playing and learning guitar and trying to get somewhere with my life in the music business.”

But there was something about the way politics spun out on Facebook — “or Crackbook, as I call it, because it’s nuts,” he said — that drove him to act up.

And so, passing time at the batting cage, “I come in and upset people,” he told me. “Half the time I’m doing it just to do it. I’m trying to be abrasive. Why not? You’re expecting it. It would be boring if everybody had the same view. No one’s converting anybody, no one’s moving the needle left or right either way on Facebook. It’s digital waste.”

This might be the key to Ross’s online persona: It mirrors the sound and fury he wields onstage, the fierce metal energy, this time directed toward his real-life friends. In his metal-rock circles, after all, hating Trump is the establishment thing to do. And Ross has always been driven to buck the establishment.

“You lob a zinger in there and it’s easy. It’s never personal. Even when I’m called the worst thing…I remain in good spirits, happy,” he said. His lax approach extends to his own posts, which, he conceded, are not always entirely accurate. “If I call somebody a Commie, it’s not really right. Democrats are not Communists.”

You call me that all the time, I told him.

“Everything that I do is with a sense of humor, with a chuckle in the background,” he said. “I know where you guys are coming from and you know where I’m coming from. I’m really not that extreme.”

I know that. I also know that I’m complicit in this mess. Like many of us living in Trumpworld, I think, I have become more obsessed and reflexively political. I goad Ross, too. Sometimes our banter is friendly and cajoling, sometimes not.

And our virtual conflict is unlikely to resolve. What was that Cheetah said about Facebook as a microcosm of the country? I figured that not long after our friendly conversation, we’d be back online and at each other’s throats.

Sure enough, soon after, Ross called me a “libtarded turd.” Some songs go on and on.

Published on January 23, 2019

Dread filled Cleveland on the eve of the 2016 Republican National Convention. The GOP was poised to nominate Donald Trump for president, and press coverage voiced concerns about violence, like the street fights outside the Democrats’ 1968 convention in Chicago. Trump himself had stoked those fears. If a brokered convention denied him the nomination, “I think you’d have riots,” he’d predicted.

But when demonstrators gathered in Public Square — a park that had reopened, after a massive renovation, just two weeks before the convention — none of that happened.

Other host cities of major-party conventions had created so-called “free speech zones” that penned protesters into fenced and forlorn spaces. Cleveland, instead, invited speech into Public Square. The city set up a stage and sound system on the Speakers’ Terrace, a curved platform built into the square’s south end. Protesters took that as a cue to congregate all across the park’s six acres: Marchers paraded through, activists performed street theater, and policemen on bicycles wedged their front tires between arguers to deescalate their debates. The 220-year-old town common managed to absorb the rage of protesters and Trump supporters alike.

“Having spaces where the adrenaline and stress of the event could play out,” says landscape architect Veronica Rivera, “allowed for people who might have very different views to discuss them without any major confrontations.” That was no accident: She and her colleagues had redesigned the park with huge crowds and public speeches in mind.

Today, when public discourse is at its coarsest and many people seek community in the virtual world, the reshaping of the six-acre Public Square is a fascinating case study in landscape as destiny. Two years earlier, Rivera notes, the park “was basically just used for transit — a huge bus stop.” The goals of the $57 million renovation project were manifold, from encouraging pedestrian use to turning Cleveland’s often-quiet downtown into more of a neighborhood.

But central to the plans, and to Cleveland’s image of itself, was a revival of Public Square’s dormant tradition as a civic space devoted to public expression.

“I always feel like it’s an open space,” says Nora Romanoff, associate director of LAND studio, a Cleveland nonprofit that managed the square’s renovation. “And I always feel like it’s a space where people can say what they think.”

Cleveland has one of the best historic public discourse traditions of any American city. It dates back to city founder Moses Cleaveland, who plotted out Public Square in 1796 as a New England-style town common — and to Tom L. Johnson, mayor from 1901 to 1909, who encouraged Public Square’s free speech tradition and held his own rallies and speeches there.

After Johnson’s 1911 death, a statue of him was erected in Public Square’s northwest quadrant. For decades, Clevelanders rallied in front of it: for Depression-era protests supporting the unemployed and steelworker strikes, for 1960s protests against the Vietnam War and the nuclear arms race. But by the 2000s, Public Square’s identity as Cleveland’s common ground had faded.

A big part of the problem was geography. Two wide thoroughfares, Superior Avenue and Ontario Street, crossed through the square, dividing it into four one-acre parks. Each quadrant felt disconnected, surrounded by car and bus traffic. At a public forum about the square in 2003, residents complained that it wasn’t pedestrian-friendly and didn’t feel welcoming. Few wanted to hold events there.

Slowly, support for a massive redesign began to build. In 2009, two local nonprofits hired the firm James Corner Field Operations — which had just reshaped a former elevated railroad into New York City’s High Line park — to rethink Cleveland’s oldest public space.

The firm came up with a bold proposal: to turn the divided park into what Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson called “one big square.” They would eliminate the crossroads at the park’s center, closing Ontario Street and allowing only buses, not cars, on Superior Avenue.

The resulting open space, they believed, could help revive Cleveland’s free-speech tradition. Planners did spatial studies on how many people could gather there and how they’d circulate in and out. “We could fit tens of thousands of people in this square,” says Romanoff.

After the Republican National Committee accepted Cleveland’s bid for the 2016 convention — which included the promise of a renovated Public Square — donations from local foundations came in, and construction started in earnest. Rivera, Field Operations’ designer for Public Square, moved to downtown Cleveland for a year to work on the project.

“People are like water: They take the easiest path.”

She and her colleagues, working with LAND studio, took inspiration from recent trends in urban public spaces. They wanted to reclaim a neglected city center, creating an activity-filled oasis at the foot of skyscrapers, as Detroit had with its Campus Martius Park in 2004.

They planned to return the square to pedestrians instead of cars, a strategy that former New York City transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan implemented in Times Square and champions in her 2016 book “Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution.”

And they wanted to embrace the square’s unique landscape, as New York did with the High Line. To do that, they studied shadows and sunlight. Skyscrapers, especially the landmark Terminal Tower on the square’s southwest end, blocked more sunlight in the square’s south half. So Rivera designed a green landscape for the north half and a “hardscaped” south half with concrete and cobblestones.

They also studied people’s walking routes. “People are like water: They take the easiest path,” says Romanoff. “So we wanted to understand: what are those paths?”

A lot of Clevelanders crossed the square diagonally, northwest to southeast or southwest to northeast. Rivera replaced the blocky quadrants with diagonal walking paths that formed a butterfly shape, hugging the hills, uniting the terraces, and embracing an 1890s-era Civil War memorial in the square’s southeast corner.

“We played a lot with topography,” Rivera says. “The square is very, very flat. So we make sure that as you’re walking places, you don’t necessarily see everything.”

And, mindful of the square’s history, Rivera designed a curved paving-stone path near the southern edge to double as the Speakers’ Terrace, overlooking a vast southern plaza.

After decades of seeing Public Square as a half-dead space, some Clevelanders — including the project’s construction workers — were skeptical that the transformation would work. “Throughout construction, the guys in the field [said], ‘Why are you so stressed out about this? No one’s going to use this,’” Rivera recalls. “It wasn’t until the end of the construction, when they saw all the pieces come together, that they also became excited about the potential.”

At 5 a.m. on the last day of June 2016, the new Public Square opened. Within 30 minutes, says Rivera, she saw a man running, a lady walking her dog, a guy eating a sandwich in the park. “Within the first day, you saw all the activities we envisioned take place,” she says. And Clevelanders quickly became comfortable going to the square at night — something almost no one did before it was redesigned.

To Rivera, it was proof she’d designed the square at a human scale, not an automobile scale. “People are innately attracted to other people,” she says. “We like to sit and people watch.”

Rivera stayed in Cleveland through the Republican National Convention, where she saw the success of the design’s deeper goal of encouraging democracy.

“An open, calm environment with the noise of the water feature and the historic monuments around you — it brought down the tensions of the whole event,” she says. That’s the promise of the park, she adds: “It should be the place where everyone feels free to come and share their perspective in a democratic and respectful way.”

Today, new generations of Clevelanders have embraced Public Square as their reborn town common, the city’s sacred ground for free speech and public discourse. Since the Republican Convention, major protests have returned to Public Square, including the 2017 Women’s March after Trump’s inauguration, the pro-gun-control March for Our Lives in March 2018, and a festival at the end of Cleveland’s 2018 Pride parade.

“I think the redesign of the square has promoted more protests, as it should,” says Kerry McCormack, downtown Cleveland’s city councilman. “It’s more open. It makes more sense for large gatherings.”

Still, Public Square’s transformation is unfinished: Despite the best intentions of planners, it’s still hard for Cleveland to put pedestrians first. The city, pleased with the new park, considered keeping Superior Avenue closed to bus traffic, but local and federal transit officials said Cleveland would have to pay back federal grants worth millions if buses couldn’t come through the square.

Then the Department of Homeland Security, concerned about increased terrorist use of car bombs on crowds in public spaces, insisted on lining a reopened Superior with barriers. So the city has blocked the park’s diagonal pathways — and added a stoplight in the center to regulate pedestrian and bus traffic.

“This is a great unfinished work of art that we’re sitting in the middle of, that has never gotten a chance to fully function as designed,” says Dan Moulthrop, CEO of the City Club of Cleveland, sitting in the square’s terraced south end near a statue of Moses Cleaveland — and staring at the traffic light.

Despite its uncorrected flaw, Public Square’s redesign has accomplished most of its mission. Moulthrop’s organization, a free speech forum founded in 1912, has hosted several civic dialogues since the park’s renovation — including a series on “the power of place,” with Public Square as a prime example. Like other civic groups, the City Club tends to use the shaded lawn, rather than the Speakers’ Terrace, for events. Moulthrop says he doesn’t want to turn off the water feature near the terrace and deprive kids of a chance to play.

“The stage on the lawn over there: That’s a place that we’ve used a lot, and it’s perfect,” Moulthrop says.

Meanwhile, the ongoing management of the park has accelerated downtown’s conversion into a neighborhood. The Group Plan Commission spends about $2 million a year on operations, maintenance, and programming, from yoga and “goat yoga” classes to kid-friendly activities near the wading pool. In winter, the pool becomes an ice-skating rink. Green-shirted “ambassadors” hired by the nonprofit Downtown Cleveland Alliance patrol the square to keep it safe and clean.

Benné Christian, 63, who has lived in Cleveland all her life, marveled at the park on a summer Sunday evening, when 2,000 people mingled for a 2018 Black Business Expo and Taste of Black Cleveland event. Around her, people grabbed burgers and Polish sausages, custom fruit arrangements, and fliers announcing an African-American playhouse’s new season.

“I love Public Square,” Christian says. “I’m truly thrilled to see the renovation. It’s got more green spaces, more spaces where people can commune.”

Across the square sat Tom L. Johnson’s statue, gazing south at the festival, as a little boy in a sky-blue shirt climbed his pedestal to stand at his knee. Johnson looked calm, curious, and satisfied — as if he knew that a new generation had revived his promise to the city. An inscription on the back of his pedestal notes that Johnson’s statue is “located on the spot he dedicated to the freedom of speech.”

Published on December 5, 2018

My public meltdown happened on Black Friday of last year, when I found myself at a two-story Gap with a line of holiday shoppers that extended around the store — and no cashiers in sight. I calmly asked a manager to fill the unused registers, but ten minutes later, they remained deserted. Coffee- and carb-deprived, hot and sweaty, and now running late, I leaned over the balcony like Norma Desmond bellowing for her Max and called out to the manager, loudly demanding to know why no one was in charge, and didn’t they want to make the sale?

Many customers applauded; others nodded their approval. A few probably whispered to their friends that I needed a Valium, which I would have been delighted to accept, had someone offered. I faced no consequences, except for the shame of knowing what I had succumbed to: the increasingly common, impossible-to-ignore adult temper tantrum.

Generations ago, people raised their eyebrows over public displays of affection. Now, we’re overrun with public displays of emotion, which often become a one-two punch of bad behavior: passions that burn far out of proportion to the situation at hand, plus a willingness to share those feelings with everyone in the vicinity, or possibly the world.

 “People are crying and screaming and having tantrums in what appears to be a public breakdown, and yet when people stop and say, ‘Why are you doing this?’ they don’t want to be questioned. They feel entitled to behave this way,” says Amanda Itzkoff, M.D., an assistant professor of psychiatry at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

And the rest of us feel compelled to watch. YouTube is littered with videos of people screaming, hitting, and raging at each other — sometimes over a wrongly filled fast food order or a snagged parking space — that can garner four or five million views.

“The media promotes these bad behaviors, while reality TV is turning civilians into cartoon characters. Our emotions are becoming entertainment,” says Charles Coletta, a lecturer of pop culture and media at Bowling Green College.

Apart from the ample internet lists of “Top 10 Meltdowns of All Time,” there are few statistics on the rise of the public tantrum. But it feels like more and more people are losing their self-control, for smaller and smaller reasons. I was entering a Starbucks in Manhattan recently when I heard a woman screaming on the street. Tears exploded from her eyes, leaving a wet trail of black on her cheeks as she spewed angrily into her phone about how disrespected she felt.

Apparently, someone had stood her up for an appointment.

It’s hard to be proud of this new way of being. I wasn’t, seconds after my meltdown in the Gap, when remorse and a sense of foolishness flooded my system. Clearly, I could have handled myself better. Why didn’t I?

I posed that question to Marc Brackett, Ph.D., director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. He told me that our inability to regulate emotions is no surprise: Many adults today haven’t had role models or guidance for proper ways of handling anger.

 “We haven’t had the opportunity to learn about our emotional life in a systematic way. We’ve learned through happenstance and by watching our parents and people in public or on TV,” Brackett says. Without strategies to regulate our moods, he says, we’re more likely to dwell on “illuminating the injustice we feel, rather than focusing on solving the problem.”

At Yale, Brackett and fellow researchers developed a program that trains children to control their emotional barometers. Called RULER — which stands for “recognizing, understanding, labeling, expressing, and regulating”— it has been implemented in more than 1,500 classrooms, from preschool through high school, building an increasingly complex curriculum around a common language for emotions. Techniques include a color-coded “mood meter” on which kids can label their emotions in real-time: Red is angry or anxious; yellow is excited; blue is grumpy or sad; green is focused and confident.

“Your brain is filled with tools for making emotions, and with a little training, you can learn to use those tools like a skilled craftsperson.”

Adults may not have access to that kind of formal training. But a growing body of research suggests that we can still take charge of our responses, as long as we understand where they come from. Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, a university distinguished professor of psychology at Northeastern University, says emotions aren’t forces that overtake us, but physical reactions we can learn to control.

“Your brain is filled with tools for making emotions, and with a little training, you can learn to use those tools like a skilled craftsperson,” says Barrett, the author of “How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life the Brain.”

Barrett studied facial expressions and the vocabulary around emotions — her research showed, for example, that the concept of a “smile” didn’t exist until the Middle Ages — and developed a novel theory of how emotions work. The brain is prewired, she explains, to create simple feelings based on physiological changes in the body, such as pleasure, pain, calmness, and agitation. Emotions are your brain’s interpretation of those feelings, based on context and personal history.

“Your brain explains your bodily feelings, creating emotions in the blink of an eye, very automatically,” Barrett says. “In this way, emotions which seem to happen to you are actually made by you.”

So changing an emotional response, Barrett says, is a matter of changing the inputs. She advises people to develop a vocabulary of “emotion words,” which the brain can use to guess which reaction is right for a given situation — being able to shift, for instance, from “he hurt me” to “we have a disagreement.” And she urges people to cultivate new experiences, since “what you experience today will become the seeds for new predictions in the future.”

Learning to control our emotions internally takes work. Learning when to share them can be equally hard. Generations ago, Itzkoff notes, Americans waged a backlash against repression and pent-up feelings: “It’s all right to cry,” football player Rosey Grier told American children in the 1972 album “Free to Be…You and Me.” But decades later, reality TV brought an avalanche of shows that exploit and reward overexpression, inviting more of it.

Today, social media poses an even bigger challenge; it’s like an open bar to an alcoholic, pushing people toward impulsive responses. Individuals can’t seem to resist, even though they know how easy it is for people to scrutinize and share their social media moves — including employers and customers. In 2014, the Travel Channel postponed the premiere of its show “Man Finds Food” after the host went on a profane rant within the comments on Instagram, in a spat about fat-shaming that spun out of control. Earlier this year, the co-founder of cosmetics firm Deciem went rogue on the corporate Instagram account, threatening the company’s future.

Like a real-life tantrum, a social media eruption has psychological — and physiological — roots. A post that gets a lot of views can actually lead to a dopamine high, says social media speaker and consultant Natalie Zfat.

“We’re used to experiencing that when we exercise, but research is showing that social media can trigger that same rush,” she says. “Social media is more about psychology than it is about technology. It’s really about how to elicit an emotional response out of an interaction.”

Zfat urges clients and audiences to choose their subjects carefully, post discreetly, and understand the limits of the medium.

“A social media feed is not a diary,” she says. “It’s not for emotional highs and lows that are usually reserved for one or two trusted friends.”

And anyone breathing anger instead of air, Zfat advises, should resist the urge to instantly comment, spew, tape, or upload. It’s like that old advice about tantrums: Take a deep breath and count to ten.

“Record what you want, or write out what you need to say,” she says. “But save it, don’t post it and wait until morning. By then you’ve removed yourself enough where you can reassess…whether or not you want to post your feelings and response for the world to see.”

After all, emotions are temporary. But the internet lingers on.

Published on November 20, 2018