Can I get a little dignity, here? I’m not asking that we all carry ourselves like Edith Wharton characters, but how did we get to this point? Everyday, I get a “Fuck You!” from someone who is behaving badly: The woman who is yapping into her cell phone and crosses into my lane gives me the finger when I tap my horn. The man whose off-leash dog charges my two properly restrained pooches glares when the snarling starts. The parent who tells me to mind my own fucking business when I suggest the one-year-old should ride in a car seat. Conflict doesn’t have to be a shrill, insulting, aggressive affair. It is possible to disagree without resorting to name-calling or speculations about one’s mother’s hygiene, sexual proclivities, or dress size. Sane, well-adjusted people do it every day.
Not enough spankings as a child–that’s my informal diagnosis for most of the folks I meet every day. Give these people a few formative years with an old-timey Southern granny and a switch, and while I don’t expect they’d come out any smarter or nicer, they at least would have a passing familiarity with Excuse Me, May I, Please, and Thank You.
Dictionary.com has these quaint notions: For debate, the noun, it says strife; contention is the archaic definition. For the verb, it tells me to fight; quarrel is the obsolete meaning. Clearly, someone did not get the memo.
As I’m sure you’re aware, yesterday a certain gentleman Representative heckled our Commander In Chief during a televised address. Where I’m from, that’s bad behavior, even if you agree with the sentiment. But apparently Joe Wilson learned his manners from talk radio, not from his momma.
What’s the problem with a little rudeness, you ask? After all, we do indeed live in rather rude times, and being polite simply for politeness’s sake smacks a little of repression. The Fuck Yous of my every day aren’t awful just because they’re rude; they’re awful because they come from a mind so tightly closed up it sees only itself. They’re selfish, in the worst possible sense of the word. (Mind you, I think a little thoughtful, well-placed selfishness is a good thing.) And while getting the middle finger in the street is not the end of civilization as we know it, it is a starting point for a much more sinister expression of that same selfishness.
Allow me to resurrect something I wrote a few years ago, that speaks to the nascent danger I see in our basic inability to handle conflict. While I’ve learned to shrug off much of the daily meanness I encounter, if only as a tactic for self-preservation, I’m still frightened by it.
Originally posted April 16, 2007:
Waving My Arms Across a Vast Ice Floe, So To Speak
In The Virgin Suicides, a novel about the successive suicides of five sisters, Jeffrey Eugenides wrote:
The essence of the suicides consisted not of sadness or mystery but simple selfishness… the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself. Her brain going dim to all else, but flaming up in precise points of pain, personal injury, lost dreams. Every other loved one receding as though across a vast ice floe, shrinking to black dots waving tiny arms, out of hearing… They made us participate in their own madness… We couldn’t imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm.
Selfish emptiness. As we build a more and more superficial and self-centered society, every day I encounter people who are so absorbed in their own little lives that they can’t see how they impact those around them. They can’t see, or worse: maybe they do, and they simply don’t care. The driver yakking on her cell phone, oblivious to the fact that she’s crossing that dotted line and putting someone else’s life at risk. The revelers who fire guns into the air for the cheap thrill it brings, ignoring that what goes up must come down and just might come down into someone’s skull. The smoker who flicks his smoldering cigarette butt out the window because he doesn’t want to deal with a full ashtray, not considering that the shoulder is tinder-dry.
We have an acute sense of entitlement in this country, but we prefer to call it freedom, because that sounds more noble. Confront the guy shouting down his cell phone in the movie theater, and he’ll angrily tell you, “It’s a free country.” We say freedom, but we mean fuck you. We’re not wearing rose-colored glasses; we’re wearing mirrored specs. We look out on the world and only see ourselves.
Today, Virginia Tech, just a short drive up the road from my birthplace and childhood home, saw one particularly heinous example of what happens when one person elevates his own personal turmoil above even the sanctity of life itself. Whether this was sparked by a domestic dispute, as the news is currently suggesting, or the shooter was on some other sort of mission, is irrelevant. The man who pulled that trigger so many times today is simply the product of his society. This is not an excuse; it is merely an explanation. When we produce children who value nothing larger than themselves, we must remember that Me First means Everyone Else Last.
* * * * * * * *
When I heard the news reports coming out of Blacksburg, I remembered how I felt on a certain September day in 2001. I don’t know anyone involved in the Tech murders; I didn’t have any personal connection to the events of 9/11. All the same, I cried both days. The tears weren’t for the students taking their last breaths in an engineering classroom, weren’t for the men and women flinging themselves from 100 stories up to escape an inescapable situation. My grief is more general. It is for the “simple selfishness” that Eugenides identifies. It is for a man who felt himself above those around him, so far above that he could express his anger or despair or frustration or apathy by robbing families of sons, daughers, sisters, brothers, fathers, mothers.
Me First.
Fuck You.
It’s a free country.
Campus security protocols and gun control are the straw men in this story. Possibly the only tenet more powerful than our collective obsession with ourselves is the notion that someone should pay when something goes wrong. We want the freedom to do whatever the hell we want to do, but we don’t want to take responsibility for the consequences of our actions. We point fingers, look for fallguys in our terrible childhoods, in a government that failed to hold our hand, in the pockets of an insurance company.
A finger-pointing, litigious, blame-passing culture produces citizens who are divorced from their own actions. Sure, I drove recklessly and killed family—what were they doing out so late? Yeah, it was obvious that the waterfall trail was high and slippery—but why weren’t there handrails and warning signs? And so goes the media coverage of today’s tragedy. We’re not talking about where this emptiness comes from, this emptiness we fill at the expense of others. We’re pointing fingers and wondering why officials didn’t “do more”, how the shooter was able to possess guns. Maybe these questions are just easier.
* * * * * * * *
In her book, For The Time Being, Annie Dillard observes that every culture we have written record of has declared their own generation hopelessly corrupt. Even centuries before the Common Era, we were throwing up our hands and shaking our heads at The Kids These Days. Is it that we humans have a notion of what is possible–we know how kind and good and harmonious we could be–and so our collective shortcomings are brought into sharper focus? Or is it that we’ve been pointing fingers ever since we evolved separate digits? It’s always been those people, other people, who are ruining civilization–the lazy, the cruel, the ignorant, the materialistic who are weaving the handbasket that will carry us all straight to hell.
Dillard quotes Theresa Mancuso: “The thing we desperately need is to face the way it is.” Am I being overly dramatic when I join the legions in the time-honored tradition of bemoaning The Way Things Are These Days? Does it get worse that men shooting dozens of students, men crashing planes into buildings because they believe whatever is in their hearts is bigger than the beating hearts inside their victims’ chests?
I’m afraid that I know the answer to that question.
And I’m heartbroken that it probably doesn’t matter if it’s yes or no.
That one sits framed just outside the home office, where I can see it every day. My “real” job demands that I remember its message every day, if only to keep my own sanity. The emails come to me wherever I am, and it’s amusing how often they are exactly what I needed to hear, either for inspiration or just for a good giggle. Today, I found this message in my inbox:
Mind Your Manners
Can I get a little dignity, here? I’m not asking that we all carry ourselves like Edith Wharton characters, but how did we get to this point? Everyday, I get a “Fuck You!” from someone who is behaving badly: The woman who is yapping into her cell phone and crosses into my lane gives me the finger when I tap my horn. The man whose off-leash dog charges my two properly restrained pooches glares when the snarling starts. The parent who tells me to mind my own fucking business when I suggest the one-year-old should ride in a car seat. Conflict doesn’t have to be a shrill, insulting, aggressive affair. It is possible to disagree without resorting to name-calling or speculations about one’s mother’s hygiene, sexual proclivities, or dress size. Sane, well-adjusted people do it every day.
Not enough spankings as a child–that’s my informal diagnosis for most of the folks I meet every day. Give these people a few formative years with an old-timey Southern granny and a switch, and while I don’t expect they’d come out any smarter or nicer, they at least would have a passing familiarity with Excuse Me, May I, Please, and Thank You.
Dictionary.com has these quaint notions: For debate, the noun, it says strife; contention is the archaic definition. For the verb, it tells me to fight; quarrel is the obsolete meaning. Clearly, someone did not get the memo.
As I’m sure you’re aware, yesterday a certain gentleman Representative heckled our Commander In Chief during a televised address. Where I’m from, that’s bad behavior, even if you agree with the sentiment. But apparently Joe Wilson learned his manners from talk radio, not from his momma.
What’s the problem with a little rudeness, you ask? After all, we do indeed live in rather rude times, and being polite simply for politeness’s sake smacks a little of repression. The Fuck Yous of my every day aren’t awful just because they’re rude; they’re awful because they come from a mind so tightly closed up it sees only itself. They’re selfish, in the worst possible sense of the word. (Mind you, I think a little thoughtful, well-placed selfishness is a good thing.) And while getting the middle finger in the street is not the end of civilization as we know it, it is a starting point for a much more sinister expression of that same selfishness.
Allow me to resurrect something I wrote a few years ago, that speaks to the nascent danger I see in our basic inability to handle conflict. While I’ve learned to shrug off much of the daily meanness I encounter, if only as a tactic for self-preservation, I’m still frightened by it.
Originally posted April 16, 2007:
Waving My Arms Across a Vast Ice Floe, So To Speak
In The Virgin Suicides, a novel about the successive suicides of five sisters, Jeffrey Eugenides wrote:
Selfish emptiness. As we build a more and more superficial and self-centered society, every day I encounter people who are so absorbed in their own little lives that they can’t see how they impact those around them. They can’t see, or worse: maybe they do, and they simply don’t care. The driver yakking on her cell phone, oblivious to the fact that she’s crossing that dotted line and putting someone else’s life at risk. The revelers who fire guns into the air for the cheap thrill it brings, ignoring that what goes up must come down and just might come down into someone’s skull. The smoker who flicks his smoldering cigarette butt out the window because he doesn’t want to deal with a full ashtray, not considering that the shoulder is tinder-dry.
We have an acute sense of entitlement in this country, but we prefer to call it freedom, because that sounds more noble. Confront the guy shouting down his cell phone in the movie theater, and he’ll angrily tell you, “It’s a free country.” We say freedom, but we mean fuck you. We’re not wearing rose-colored glasses; we’re wearing mirrored specs. We look out on the world and only see ourselves.
Today, Virginia Tech, just a short drive up the road from my birthplace and childhood home, saw one particularly heinous example of what happens when one person elevates his own personal turmoil above even the sanctity of life itself. Whether this was sparked by a domestic dispute, as the news is currently suggesting, or the shooter was on some other sort of mission, is irrelevant. The man who pulled that trigger so many times today is simply the product of his society. This is not an excuse; it is merely an explanation. When we produce children who value nothing larger than themselves, we must remember that Me First means Everyone Else Last.
* * * * * * * *
When I heard the news reports coming out of Blacksburg, I remembered how I felt on a certain September day in 2001. I don’t know anyone involved in the Tech murders; I didn’t have any personal connection to the events of 9/11. All the same, I cried both days. The tears weren’t for the students taking their last breaths in an engineering classroom, weren’t for the men and women flinging themselves from 100 stories up to escape an inescapable situation. My grief is more general. It is for the “simple selfishness” that Eugenides identifies. It is for a man who felt himself above those around him, so far above that he could express his anger or despair or frustration or apathy by robbing families of sons, daughers, sisters, brothers, fathers, mothers.
Me First.
Fuck You.
It’s a free country.
Campus security protocols and gun control are the straw men in this story. Possibly the only tenet more powerful than our collective obsession with ourselves is the notion that someone should pay when something goes wrong. We want the freedom to do whatever the hell we want to do, but we don’t want to take responsibility for the consequences of our actions. We point fingers, look for fallguys in our terrible childhoods, in a government that failed to hold our hand, in the pockets of an insurance company.
A finger-pointing, litigious, blame-passing culture produces citizens who are divorced from their own actions. Sure, I drove recklessly and killed family—what were they doing out so late? Yeah, it was obvious that the waterfall trail was high and slippery—but why weren’t there handrails and warning signs? And so goes the media coverage of today’s tragedy. We’re not talking about where this emptiness comes from, this emptiness we fill at the expense of others. We’re pointing fingers and wondering why officials didn’t “do more”, how the shooter was able to possess guns. Maybe these questions are just easier.
* * * * * * * *
In her book, For The Time Being, Annie Dillard observes that every culture we have written record of has declared their own generation hopelessly corrupt. Even centuries before the Common Era, we were throwing up our hands and shaking our heads at The Kids These Days. Is it that we humans have a notion of what is possible–we know how kind and good and harmonious we could be–and so our collective shortcomings are brought into sharper focus? Or is it that we’ve been pointing fingers ever since we evolved separate digits? It’s always been those people, other people, who are ruining civilization–the lazy, the cruel, the ignorant, the materialistic who are weaving the handbasket that will carry us all straight to hell.
Dillard quotes Theresa Mancuso: “The thing we desperately need is to face the way it is.” Am I being overly dramatic when I join the legions in the time-honored tradition of bemoaning The Way Things Are These Days? Does it get worse that men shooting dozens of students, men crashing planes into buildings because they believe whatever is in their hearts is bigger than the beating hearts inside their victims’ chests?
I’m afraid that I know the answer to that question.
And I’m heartbroken that it probably doesn’t matter if it’s yes or no.
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