When email was new and I was in firm management, I was always appalled at the tone used when people were emailing each other back and forth with language that would never be used face to face. I don’t think any of this is healthy. Ideas are now transmitted rapidly and electronically without regard to their veracity.

The language that we hear on television and, yes, on the floor of the Boston City Council, would never have been used in private 50 years ago. It is now used in public. It is a very different world than the one that I knew toward the end of the last century.

This is not the America that DeTocqueville reported on almost 200 years ago. Community organizations such as veterans’ posts, Knights of Columbus Councils, Holy Name Societies, Rotaries, Kiwanis, Lions, have disappeared left and right; many doors are shuttered. Harvard Professor Robert Putnam long ago detailed the diminished vibrancy of civic life in America. The Sons of Italy Lodge of which I have been a member for over 40 years, and which my grandfather founded more than 100 years ago, announced recently that the organization may sell their real estate.

The Boston Sports Club, of which I was a member for 16 years, closed on 24 hours’ notice, never to reopen, a microcosm of society disappeared. Friendships evaporated. These are all victims of the pandemic.

This is also a very different America from the America I knew as a young man on the City Council. Perhaps this is in part because of the toxic polarization of our politics. I disagreed with Louise Day Hicks. I disagreed with Fred Langone. We were civil enough with each other, however, so that we could get things done. That is not necessarily the case today. It is very troubling and is in part because of the elevation of people on the political fringes to positions of visibility as a result of media outlets that overemphasize their importance.

Anyone who has studied American politics understands that much of the political energy through the first decades of the 20th century emanated from the left. The Progressive Era brought about significant reforms, as did the New Deal and the Civil Rights Movement and the legislation that followed. And let’s not forget the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and Medicare!

For the past 50 years or so, however, political energy has been emanating from the right. Prop. 13 and its progeny, Ronald Reagan and all he stood for. Newt Gingrich, who chose to shut down the government. The Tea Party, which gave most all of us a big headache and then, of course, Donald Trump. There has been a succession of tax cuts and deregulatory actions. Who knows what is next?

It is to wonder why the left has been obsessing with identity politics and which pronouns people will identify themselves with, rather than dealing with bread-and-butter economic issues that impact the great majority of Americans. Perhaps I am naive, but I believe that one can be both progressive and patriotic. I see no contradiction in being an advocate for change, and also being an advocate for rules.

I fear that our problem is that the great majority of our political activity is generated by people who are Washington-centric; either they live there, or they want to live there. Alas, Washington is a city where everybody talks to people who are exactly like them. They are not out and about, even in communities such as Wellesley, even in cities as urbane as Boston.

The Washington Post reports that a survey on political attitudes by the non-partisan research group More in Common concludes that the five most common emotions toward our nation today are “frustration, disappointment, exhaustion, disgust, and anger.” More in Common suggests many Americans are members of the “exhausted majority.” George Will has suggested that “most Americans are not angry; they are exhausted and embarrassed by exhibitionistic, political anger.”

Thomas Frank, author of “What’s the Matter with Kansas,” has written extensively on this topic. He suggests: “It must be demanded by ordinary people…coming together in the millions in a social movement capable of sweeping all before it.”

Steve Pearlstein recently wrote in the Washington Post that the nation really needed “an uprising of the serious.” I think he is right. Maybe we need the adults to once again step up, as they did during World War II and at other times throughout the nation’s history.

There is about the land a form of neo-nihilism. There are some on the political fringes – on both the left and the right - who support tearing down most any institution simply because it is an institution. There is not necessarily any logic involved.

There are similarities to the chaos that preceded the Civil War and, sadly, presented in Nazi Germany some 100 years ago.

Marty Baron, former editor-in-chief at the Boston Globe and the Washington Post recently gave a major speech in defense of objective journalism, wherein he questioned the advocacy role of so many working for major newspapers. He suggested newsrooms should embody “more humility, less hubris.” I fear that the media have a bias toward reporting bad news. Good things never seem to be reported. Maybe all of us need to emphasize that there are good things happening in the world.

Lawrence S. DiCara is an attorney, a native of Dorchester, and a former Boston city councillor.