I am disgusted!! NO I'm not offended, as that isn't safe these days, but I AM disgusted!!
It's a matter of the straw that broke the camel's back! It does no good to go over the disgraces I see around me constantly these days. You all can see them and perhaps are becoming accustomed to them. As for me, I will NOT stoop to the modern disgusting lows!!!! I've gotten along without them all this time and I have no interest in learning how to swear or belittle others or think the whole world revolves around me!!
Let's just say that I'm old enough to remember being expected to show respect to ALL people--especially older people!! Nobody ever said to me "Show respect to others" that I can recall. It was just normal to say, "Please" when I wanted something and "Thank you" when I received it. IS THAT SO DIFFICULT???????
I better just drop it as I'm too upset now to write well and you know how I value my fine use of the English language. What a JOKE! Who even cares any more how they speak let alone how they write??
So I went in search of an article which could adequately and politely share my thoughts on this topic. The one that I almost shared, because of how I'm feeling right now, was ludicrous. It was this guy cussing at people for having low manners. It was almost hilarious if I weren't so sad about this whole topic!
I could appreciate this article as it was written by someone who enjoys the finer things in life--the things like dressing up and going to the theater with a friend. What could be better?? I think that he did well to press by these 2 peace mongers but it made enough of an impact on him to write about it later on.
I like how our writer ended his thoughts on the subject. Perhaps you will too?
Happy Sabbath to all my loves,
Dawn
Sunday Obverver
THE DECLINE OF MANNERS
BAKER COLUMN
OBSERVER:
The Decline of Manners
By RUSSELL BAKER
I am not of the party that holds the world is getting worse year by year. Quite the opposite. In most respects, I believe, it has improved slightly since the time of the Babylonians. In one respect, however, there has been a recent decline that is hard to live with.
I am speaking of manners, courtesy, etiquette - whatever you choose to call it. What I call it is civilized social behavior, and, stuffy though that sounds, it is the grease that makes it possible for all of us to rub together without unnecessary overheating.
There are times, of course, when overheating is both necessary and satisfying, but a society perpetually overheated is a society bound to suffer cracked gasket and roasted pistons. Manners, courtesy, etiquette - these keep the temperature down.
I mean, suppose you are walking a crowded sidewalk and two perfect strangers up ahead are enjoying a loud quarrel concerning an automobile. I am talking now about New York, where loud street quarrels, usually about automobiles, though sometimes about marriage or garbage cans, are commonplace.
In New York etiquette, violent shouting between disputants is O.K. and words elsewhere considered appropriate only in a Marine barracks, though not precisely O.K., are accepted by the populace, more or less the way a fancy hostess might accept the ignorance of a guest who drinks from the finger bowl.
Even in New York, however, it is a bit much for one of the disputants to offer to shoot the other right there on the sidewalk, as occurred in this particular incident on 44th Street off Sixth Avenue. This is midtown Manhattan, for heaven's sake. It is the theater district. In certain streets, I know, threats of shooting, and even shooting, are part of the social code, but in the theater district they are an unspeakable breach of etiquette.
Consider the social problem they create for the hundreds of pedestrians not interested in the quarrel about the car. On this occasion I was in a hurry to get to the theater to meet someone under the marquee, and since I had the tickets it would have been a breach of decorum to arrive not only late, but also shot.
One of the two men blocking the sidewalk was shouting, ''All right, you want me to shoot you, I'll shoot you,'' and the other was saying, in the manner of people with little breeding and less discretion, ''Go ahead and shoot, you -.'' ''Vile person'' was the civilized term for which he was looking, without success.
The threatening fellow had no gun in evidence, but looked capable of producing one very quickly. Obviously, he was utterly unconcerned about the social awkwardness he was causing among the rest of the people on the sidewalk.
Here was a typical case of men without the slightest sense of courtesy indulging themselves at the expense of a great number of people who had no interest in them, in their quarrel, in their automobile or even in whether they shot each other. Why do so many people nowadays think it a matter of right to carry on so rudely?
If one man is of a mind to shoot another and the proposed victim proposes that he ''go ahead and shoot,'' surely they can easily satisfy themselves without overheating a hundred miscellaneous strangers. The simplest sense of good manners might have reminded them that they had a car, after all, and that they could get into the thing and drive to some out-of-the-way location where they could shoot and be shot, or just scream at each other, without terrifying a whole community.
A few years ago they would have done this instinctively. Though obviously not gentlemen, they would most probably have felt constrained by the prevailing national code of manners against committing a nuisance, not to say a felony, in front of a hundred witnesses.
What they were doing, I suspect, is what so many of the expanding population of boors is doing these days. They were presumptuously exercising their presumed right to express themselves freely in public. Since the 1960's, when public displays of coarse manners became a popular activity, justifiable as political action, the habit of swinish behavior has become addictive, and the addiction has become epidemic.
In this matter I am an absolute reactionary. If people want to behave like louts, so be it. But let them do it down in the warehouse district after midnight, the way louts used to do.
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