An article in The Telegraph asks “Could We Be A Little Bit More Polite, Please?”. Just as California seems to lead the rest of America in trends, the UK often leads America in trends. The trend toward increased rudeness is one trend we must do all we can to stop from coming to our shores. Here are a few quotes from this excellent article:
More and more last year, it seemed that many of us thought it our right to offend or inconvenience others. We considered consideration beneath us. Today, as we decide on our New Year’s resolutions for 2009, being more polite would make an excellent choice.
Go to YouTube and search for a video featuring your favourite singer. Below it, read the comments posted by other visitors to the site. Among them there’s almost certain to be an eruption of insults based on the singer’s character, intelligence, gender, sexuality, nationality or religion. Other visitors, more often than not, will have leapt to the singer’s defence – usually by posting messages insulting the original visitor’s character, intelligence, gender, sexuality, nationality or religion. On the internet, people now feel at liberty to taunt others in a way they’d never dare do in person – or so you’d hope, anyway.
And while many of the latest electronic means of communication were created to bring us closer together, they are also cutting us off from each other. If you’re reading your emails on an iPhone while walking down the street – an increasingly widespread habit last year – you may be keeping up with friends and colleagues, but you’re oblivious to pedestrians around you.
However, these new means of communication have succeeded in achieving one thing: they have given us the impression that we are entitled to get whatever we want, as quickly as we want it. Listen to music, check your emails, make some telephone calls – whenever and wherever you like. Being spoilt in this way means that, when we find ourselves experiencing the least inconvenience, we feel affronted, as if our rights were being trampled on.
A long queue at the cash machine, being kept on hold when telephoning the bank, waiting more than 10 seconds to cross a busy road – it’s almost a reflex, these days, to take such trifles personally. A phenomenon of the Nineties was road rage. Today, I’m sure that more and more of us feel pavement rage. There are too many people and they’re in our way.
More than a million members of Facebook have joined a group on the website, called “I Secretly Want to Punch Slow Walking People in the Back of the Head”. Getting angry, in this irrational and impotent manner, only makes us ruder. Either we barge other pedestrians out of our path or we snap, “Excuse me” in a tone more appropriate to a curse.
Perhaps the biggest problem is that rudeness is, in some quarters, no longer something to be ashamed of; it’s applauded. This is an attitude fed by reality television. We see it in every series of The Apprentice and Big Brother. Again and again, contestants who have said something tactless or insulting will protest that they’re merely being “honest”, while contestants who politely try to conceal their dislike of others are dismissed as “two-faced”.
As civilization continues to unravel at the seams and our economy and society race to the bottom of a pit, those of baser instincts will become increasingly rude and hostile. At the same time, Southern Gentlemen and Ladies will continue to take the high road. The code of the Southern Gentleman could easily be summarized in the single word, “polite”. There is absolutely no reason why we cannot revive that in today’s society. Let’s make that part of our New Year’s Resolution.
