Circular Cruises/Rudeness
From Eccentric Flower
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Rudeness 9 July 1997 It has been a long-standing truism of mine that southerners are more hypocritical than northerners. But northerners are ruder. That's it. You can go read a different entry now. - - - Oh, all right. The difference, really, is in public behavior. Northerners are abrupt, they shove and growl and are always in a hurry. Southerners come on all polite and such and never hurry anywhere. But in the long run it doesn't matter - they will either like you or hate you, no matter what you see on their faces. A southerner who hates your guts will seldom tell you that to your face, but Southern hate and Northern hate work exactly the same way. With northerners, usually what you see is what you get. Which leads me to wonder. If the northerner's behavior in public - where everyone else is an obstruction to his progress, an impediment to his day - is basically the more honest viewpoint, as I believe it is, then that doesn't speak well as to the regard we have for other humans (that we're not personally friends with). - - - Can it be that we all really don't like each other much at first sight? And is the decline of public manners a sign of the larger decline of civilization, as Heinlein thought it was? I mean, look around. Public behavior has gone to hell. People are just plain outright rude to each other. No one forms an orderly line anymore at a fast-food joint or a grocery or a coffeehouse - there's all manner of skipping and jostling and jockeying for position. People shout obscenities at other people for the slightest transgression. And no one, no one ever admits they were wrong anymore. In Boston, if another driver yells at you for doing something boneheaded, do you fess up? Of course not. You yell back, louder. - - - I'm not sure what this all means. I don't think the spiral downward will continue indefinitely. Sooner or later, like the stock market (don't get me started), there'll be a big correction and a major public incident or two, and everybody will start being polite again. But it'll be a different kind of polite, a tenser one. When politeness comes back into society, it won't be due to courtesy - courtesy is already a lost art - it'll be due to fear. Recrimination. Lawsuits. "An armed society is a polite society." This is known as doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. Copyright © July 1997. All rights reserved. |
