Jeffrey Weiss, longtime staff writer at
The Dallas Morning News, died October 25, 2017 from glioblastoma, a form of brain cancer. He wrote about his journey to the egress, as he put it, with realism and good spirit. But I don't want to speak of his illness. It's his writing that inspired me. I said upon his death that Jeffrey Weiss was the best thing that ever happened to Facebook. What I meant is that where most (reasonable) people steered away from the closed-minded, interminable arguments with (crazy) people, he saw an opportunity to engage everyone, taking their opinions and beliefs seriously and gently probing those beliefs in hopes of achieving some level of mutual understanding. He promoted what he called civil dialog, or
"civilogue". He influenced no less than the
New York Times to change their practices regarding online comments. I admired his approach, and although I sometimes sought to emulate Weiss, I all too often resorted to snark, sarcasm, and satire. Reading Weiss made me uncomfortable doing so.
After the jump, two maxims from Jeffrey Weiss.