Behave Yourself!

I read a blog a few days ago that was about rudeness. A person was asked to talk to a class. A guest speaker. She was asked to speak by a former student of her's because she had information to impart and because he respected her knowledge.

She found a class with several people texting. She asked them to stop. Most did, one didn't.

The blog was about tolerance, mine is about courtesy, manners, and civility and why these are in short supply.

A comment I made on her blog is what I truly believe:

Rudeness is the natural state of human behavior, we are taught manners.

It is true. You know it in your hearts. When we are infants we are selfish and demanding. We get our way too, don't we? If not, the parents are bad and the children deprived. But over the next couple of years, things change. We learn to move around, to speak. And we begin to learn that there are limits.

My mother once told me, when I told her I thought my father didn't like us children very much, that he loved children... until they learned to speak and learned the word "no."

At this point, society stops seeing the parent who caters to his/her children as good. Instead, he/she becomes a bad parent. When, exactly, this change should take place is a gray area but we, society, know it when we see it.

In most cases, children do learn manners before going to school for the first time. Most have learned to share, to play with others without fighting (mostly), to treat adults with deference, and so on.

There is a period where manners go away again. It is called adolescence. Rudeness becomes the natural state again. Sullenness, rebellion, indifference to the feelings of others (especially adults and those not in the teen's clique) are the common signs.

In earlier days, pre-mid 20th century, this behavior wasn't tolerated. But after 1950, that changed. It was not only tolerated, it was expected and see as a normal part of growing up. Yet, as one moved out of their teens, that behavior was expected to revert to the learned manners. The adolescent was to emerge as a polite, courteous, adult.

But something began to change in the last few decades of the 20th century. We stopped growing up. We stopped reverting to the manners we learned as children. And our children were not expected to behave, self esteem became more important than civility.

And now those children are raising their children and they have no model to follow.

And civility is no longer respected. It is now laughed at, derided, dissed.




The Simpsons have successfully replaced the Andersons.









I am growing into a grouchy old codger, aren't I?

(to read the blog I reference click Here )

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