Why can’t we all grow up? That’s the thought that comes to me while watching the kvetching, screaming and tantrum throwing that’s surrounded the health care vote. For some time, both sides have been like four year-olds, squabbling over buckets and rakes in the sandbox. My disgust turned to horror this week when the brawl turned truly ugly by the degenerating into racial slurs and escalating into violence. Unfortunately, I see the same kind of escalation in the workplace.

Protesters marching at the Capitol on March 20th called two black congressmen, the legendary civil rights hero John Lewis of Georgia and Andre Carson of Indiana, a racial epithet as they walked by. The same group of hooligans used that same unmentionable racial epithet with Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri. They also spit on him. They went on to hurl an anti-gay slur at Barney Frank of Massachusetts and the anti-abortion Democrat Bart Stupak was called a “baby killer” by Texas Republican Rep Randy Neugebauer, who says he’s had a “tremendous outpouring” of support for his outburst.

Now, the FBI is investigating acts of vandalism and a death threat aimed at House Democrats who voted for the legislation. A freshman Democrat from Virginia, Rep Tom Perriello, reported that a gas line had been severed at his brother’s home. (They suspect that vandals tried to target his house and mistakenly hit his brother’s instead after a “Tea Party” activist posted Perriello’s brother’s address on a blog, mistakenly identifying it as the congressman’s home and urging reader’s to “drop by…and express their thanks regarding his vote for health care.” Two congresswomen - one in New York and another in Arizona - said windows at their district offices were smashed. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer reported that more than 10 members had received threats.

What’s going on here? Can’t we learn how to disagree without being disagreeable? With a nod to Robert Fulghum, as I wrote in The Power of a Good Fight and We Need to Talk: Difficult Conversations with Your Employee; here are the rules for dialogue that we should have learned in kindergarten:

1. Use your inside voice; don’t use bad words. Focus on the issue, not the person. We don’t need to attack the person with whom we disagree, we can passionately argue about the issues instead.
2. Use your words; don’t hit. Passionate beliefs can be a good thing, but use your passion to register voters or write editors, not to throw rocks.
3. If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything. You can disagree without being disagreeable.

Of course, even in the workplace, many of us regress to the sandbox from time to time but we all need to mightily resist this urge. One of my favorite stories comes from the novelist Andrew Greeley. In one of his early novels, he wrote about the story of an elderly priest. Someone asked the priest what he had learned from forty years of hearing confessions and he replied: “I’ve learned that there are no real grown-ups.”

While we may shake our heads and agree, in both the workplace and in public life, it’s our job to rise above the fray and use all our skills to create a civil discourse. It can be done and we owe it to ourselves and our children to try. Otherwise, we’re all in the sandbox along with them.