While he was in the White House, John Kennedy's numerous liaisons were never in the media. But beginning with the pursuit of Gary Hart in 1987, the rules changed. Politicians cannot have a private life or the dignity of not being judged for indiscretions that don't involve their public careers. Friends don't talk on the phone. Teachers use it to evade teaching or to avoid research in books.
Children play games on the Internet rather than play with each other.
It limits our ability to stop the kinds of real and mini-genocide that now plague us. Rescue on an international scale is something we are less and less inclined to do. These are fundamental changes in the way we live and they have made way for what I would call the logic of incivility. But given the historical conditions I have outlined, there is a logic to our incivility. All too often it pays to be uncivil.