What happened to civility? Manners? Being polite? Was their a time when America was a kinder, more gentle place? The more consideration the question of civility is given the more difficult it is to answer. The causes for our descent into rudeness are many and varied.
Old homes versus new houses. Drive through an old neighborhood and look at the houses. We lived on Monroe Street in Galesburg many years ago. The house was built in 1915 along with most of the other houses on the street. What do those houses have in common? Big front porches. In the evening families were out on the front porch interacting with their neighbors. Keeping a watchful eye on what was going on in the area. In new neighborhoods front porches are almost nonexistent. There isn't any way to go out there and sit. Wouldn't matter if there was because there wouldn't be anyone going out there to sit. New homes have a great big deck in the back of the house. The owners ideal seems to be to surround it with a privacy fence. It seems to say: "I've put up with you people all day and now I want to be home and left alone." We don't have neighbors now, we have people who live next door. We come home and isolate ourselves in front of our televisions. We watch "reality" television.
Television is the second problem. Reality television has nothing to do with reality any longer. Everything is scripted. It is make believe. Listen to how they speak to each other. How rude and at times cruel their language is. Far too many people, not just young people, cannot separate the fantasy these shows put forward from the reality of how people should treat each other. Dr. Phil, Oprah, Jerry Springer, Judge Judy, The Talk, The View and a hundred other shows seem at times to feature people behaving badly and mistreating each other. While the hosts say the behavior is not acceptable no counterpoint is given. All that is seen is poor conduct. People tend to mimic the behavior they see. Repeat the language they hear. People seem to think that being on television makes them special even when the end result is them being made to look rude and stupid. The desire for celebrity seems to mean everything to them.
The third issue is our political discourse. It seems to me that the vast majority of folks reside in the middle ground between conservative and liberal. Richard Nixon called them the "silent majority". They listen while the extremes on both ends yell at each other. They call each other names. They refuse to listen to each other. They seem to think if they tell a lie long enough and loud enough it will become the truth. Watch the Sunday shows like Meet the Press. When you have one person from each side they simply talk over or past each other. Neither one can finish a sentence without being interrupted. They don't debate a point. They show up with what they want to talk about and don't deviate from their scripted remarks. When your position on gun control does not go beyond "From my cold dead hands" there is no way to make any meaningful progress. The goal of those elected does not seem to be any more than being reelected. If I do the "right" thing it might be unpopular and I will lose my seat. Better to just block things and talk about the one minor flaw that wouldn't allow me to vote for an issue. Our leaders are not modeling appropriate conduct and we seem more than willing to follow their bad example.
Fourth is the internet. We have a way to be unknown and say anything we want to anyone. My screen name can be rude_ass@billybob.com. No one knows who I am and I get to write anything I want. There is plenty of political stuff on Facebook and you get to see people make comments like this one from a real feed today. "If the puke wanted to fight 'vietnam right', why didn't the coward puke just GO, and fight then. No...the bitch took FIVE deferrments because he is a yellow dog with not a hair on his coward ass." So we say things like that on an internet site and eventually it makes us feel empowered. It bleeds over into our everyday life and conversation.
The final issue is income inequality. We have seen millions of jobs go overseas. We have watched as CEO's and corporations make millions of dollars in salary and profit and pay little or no taxes. There are 10 applicants for each job. Jobs that are increasingly lower paying with fewer benefits. We are the beggars waiting on scraps from the buffet table of the wealthy. So we fight each other for the scraps. It leads to rudeness and discontent. Too many are going to college to emerge with excessive student loan debt only to realize the job they were hoping for is out of their reach. They are now working a checkout lane at WalMart, or waiting tables at a restaurant. No wonder they are rude. They left high school with the dream of getting an education and a good job. They leave school in debt and working a job that doesn't require their level of education.
So those are the things I think have contributed to the putting us where we are today. How do we fix this? We have to find some way to begin on the most basic level. We can't be a kinder nation until we are a kinder state, county, city, village, neighborhood, block and family. Get involved and make a difference. One person at a time.
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