Civil discourse didn’t die with a bang. It bled out slowly while most of us were busy yelling at each other online. I felt it this past summer on a family trip to Port Aransas, walking along the beach with my 11-year-old daughter. She pointed to a line of pickup trucks flying political flags, most of them plastered with language I wouldn’t put on a bumper sticker, let alone blast across a 3×5 flag at a beach where kids are building sandcastles and hunting for seashells. She looked up at me and said, “Why do all those flags have the f-word on them?” I kind of froze. What was I supposed to say? That screaming obscenities at strangers is now considered standard political expression?

What’s alarming isn’t just the vulgarity, but that we barely even notice it anymore. Crudeness has become mainstream and somewhere along the way, we made the collective decision to trade civility for catharsis. The shift didn’t happen sudden. It crept in over the past couple decades, driven by social media, partisan media, and a growing appetite for outrage. Former (and probably future) President Donald Trump didn’t invent it, but he definitely amplified it. His style—aggrieved, performatively blunt, proudly impolite—tore down whatever thin membrane was left between “saying it like it is” and just being an asshole. It resonated with people who were tired of being told to watch their tone. Tired of filters. Tired of losing. There’s a strange appeal in that kind of speech. It can feel “authentic,” especially to those who believe they’ve been sidelined or silenced, but what we call authenticity is often just hostility. Once the rules of respectful engagement were dismissed as elitist or weak, we didn’t magically get better dialogue. But we did get more slogans, louder shouting, and far fewer conversations even worth having.

You see it everywhere now. Flags and bumper stickers with slogans like “Fuck Your Feelings,” “Joe and the Hoe Gotta Go,” “Trump That Bitch.” The kind of stuff that has always been said in bars after a few drinks with friends is now boldly flying over homes in neighborhoods, plastered on trucks parked in front of the grocery stores, and printed on t-shirts people proudly wear in public. It feels like things that used to live in the shadows, things people didn’t say out loud, are now worn like a badge of honor.

It’s not just that this language is vulgar, but it’s that it’s proud of being vulgar. And the irony that more than a few of the same people who used to preach about “decency” are now the ones cheering it on. The Republican Party once positioned itself as the adults in the room, the moral compass, the party of “family values.” But somewhere along the way values got traded in for volume and profanity and mockery became the brand, not the exception. Nothing is more important to the modern republican party than “owning the libs.”

But this isn’t just a conservative problem. The left does its own version of it. The snark, the condescension, the irony stacked so thick you can’t tell if someone is actually angry or just trying to get a reaction. Tweets designed to humiliate. Dunking on people instead of engaging them. Maybe it’s a different energy, but it still gets to the same place where nobody’s actually talking to each other.

Social media tends to amplify and makes all of this worse. The more outraged and angrier you are, the more attention you get, and attention is currency nowadays. If you say something calm and measured, and it usually just disappears. But if you say something intentionally inflammatory, there’s a real chance it goes viral. So we get trained to escalate and speak in absolutes and post before we think. We turn every disagreement into a moral failing and the algorithm rewards it. The louder and more righteous a post is, the more legitimate it feels. Every share and like is another vote of approval and it doesn’t matter if it’s cruel or untrue, so long as it gets a reaction.

I’m not saying people don’t have the right to be angry and to express that anger. I’ve been genuinely frustrated with the direction our country is going for a long time and I haven’t exactly been quiet about it. I believe in the First Amendment and I absolutely mean that. I took an oath to defend it and the rest of the Constitution when I joined the military, and I’d fully defend someone’s right to say something I find completely abhorrent. But a right isn’t the same thing as a good idea, and a lot of what’s passing for political speech right now has no goal except to piss somebody off and score points.

I think maybe that’s the thing that’s actually been lost, not decency in the abstract, but the practical place where folks can disagree and still get somewhere. Where somebody might actually walk away from a conversation or debate thinking differently than when they showed up. That space has gotten a lot smaller and the people who still want to use it, the ones who are actually curious, who might be persuadable, they mostly just end up going quiet, because it doesn’t feel worth it to show up if you’re just going get shouted down.

We tell our kids to “use their words,” to be kind to people, and to actually listen. Maybe it’s time we stop lecturing and start modeling that behavior ourselves. I know my daughter is watching and she’s going to learn a lot more from what she sees than from anything I tell her.

We don’t have to be polite for politeness’s sake, but if we don’t bring some civility, nuance, and understanding back into our debates and disagreements, then nothing will change. We’ll just keep yelling at each other and flinging profanities and insults instead of actual positions and nothing will ever get better.

So go ahead and fly your flags and slap stickers on you car and say your piece on social media. You have that right as an American. But maybe we should also try to pause and ask ourselves: is this helping? Is this adding anything to the conversation or am I just making more noise? Because what we say matters, but so does how we say it. Especially now.

Nick Allison is a combat veteran, college dropout, and writer based in Austin, Texas. Don’t take anything he says too seriously, he’s just trying to figure out this ride we call existence like everyone else. Also, he enjoys writing his own bio in the third person, because it probably makes him feel more important and smarter than he actually is.