Browsing through back issues of this newspaper while looking for something else, we paused to re-read the many letters on the Madison/High School roundabout.

What struck us in retrospect was not the degree of opposition – we remembered that – but of the vituperation.

The first letter, published on Jan. 27, questioned whether the project was being considered because of “incompetence or stupidity,” and suggested “a class-action lawsuit against the city administration for wasting city funds.”

On Feb. 14, the roundabout was “the dumbest thing the city has considered doing.” On March 7, a reader opined that “successful organizations never let engineers control decisions.” On March 14, the council was accused of being “only interested in benefitting themselves.”

And one letter we recalled that didn’t make the paper – the rhetoric just seemed too tasteless and absurd – suggested that the roundabout be named as a memorial for a specific elected official, “because of all the people who are going to be killed there.”

Now that it’s a reality, the roundabout seems to work pretty well. We have yet to see any backup at that intersection – the island’s busiest of those not on the highway – even during the evening ferry-commute jams. Many skeptics have been surprised at how easily traffic passes through. And we’ve neither seen nor heard of any problems with pedestrians.

In short, it works like it was designed to.

But the sequence suggests to us a breakdown in our civic dialog. Would the city’s public works staff and the council have opted for a plan that would have worked as badly as the opponents suggested? Surely not. By the same token, we’re pretty certain roundabout foes would have been less outraged had they foreseen how it would actually function.

We recall an on-site demonstration last spring, when one of the protesters, observing that we might have been at some of the meetings where the roundabout was discussed, asked what the stated advantages might be. A fair question, of course – but one more sensibly asked before protesting.

As the roundabout rhetoric demonstrated, one element too frequently missing from our civic conversation is the presumption of good faith on the part of our public officials or our political opponents. We are quick to assume those who disagree with us, or who propose a novel idea, are either stupid or motivated by their own interests.

Why not instead make the charitable (and perhaps more accurate) assumption that they have different information? Sometimes, their information is better than ours.

We’re not suggesting blind acceptance of what our public officials or anyone else tells us. Quite the contrary; as citizens, we should ask questions and demand answers.

But while asking questions is our right as a citizen, it is also something of a duty. Before we decide that others are stupid – much less bad – we owe it to them and to ourselves to understand their reasoning.

To do that we not only have to ask questions. We also have to listen to the answers.