Can you remember the time when men opened doors for women, when random acts of kindness received a friendly wave or a thank you, when people actually looked and listened when you were talking to them, when hats were worn by gentlemen and tipped in greeting? Those, and many others, were standards of courtesy. How things have changed!
Now, we have road rage, obscene gestures, public displays of vulgarity, and more. As disturbing as these things are, I find their public acceptance as the norm even more alarming.
I think I should write a sitcom; the formula is standard: A group of people, usually a combination of the painfully handsome or the inexplicably odd, are sitting in a living room. Conversations are dismissive and often rude. A door opens, in pops a newcomer who offers in greeting a sexual double entendre followed by a laugh-track explosion.
It goes downhill from there. Then there are the commercials, all sowing the seeds of discontent for your life and offering a remedy. The most obnoxious of all are those for “ED,” as it is euphemistically called. I would not be surprised if a middle school teacher has not had a boy tell her he must go to the doctor—immediately– because he has had . . . “the four hour ‘problem.’”
Saddest of all is that there is an audience for this; there are advertisers who pay tens of millions to sponsor such drivel. And now we get down to the nitty-gritty. It must reflect who we are as a people and we wonder why much of the world is mystified by what we seem to enjoy.
Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern, Don Imus, to mention only a few, have parlayed our penchant for the rude and prurient into personal fortunes. When they have stepped over the line of common decency, they suffer little. They may be given a furlough for a few weeks, they offer a totally lame apology such as, “I was only trying to be funny,” or sponsors may drop them . . . only to be replaced by new ones.
How refreshing it would be to have a political candidate whose views have been supported and extolled by such broadcasts interrupt their self-promoting speech with a ringing disengagement from such talk. There was a revealing political cartoon by David Fitzsimmons in The Arizona Daily Star last week. It depicted the Republican elephant excusing himself from the commentator’s diatribe only to have Limbaugh smugly call after him, “You’ll be back.” Too, true, I am afraid.
What producer has had the guts to fire such a speaker on the spot, to give him 30 minutes to collect his pencil and paper, and then evict him from the broadcast studio forever? What candidate would state publicly that he or she would not tolerate being in the same room with someone who had spouted such vile words? None of which I know. The reason seems to be that the public would not support such a forthright approach.
How sad it is that we have lowered ourselves to such a level. The bad-mouthed broadcasters are not to blame. They are who they are, lamentable as that may be. The blame lies with those who will abide such behavior or worse yet, endorse it, excuse it, or laugh at it. That group, or so it seems, includes most of the population. If it were not so, then the problem would have corrected itself years ago.
So there you have it: My Quarterly Curmudgeon Column. If I were not guilty of some of the infractions of common civility of which I have written, I could not convincingly speak against it. Unfortunately, I know personally the damage it causes to our society, particularly younger folk. If they don’t learn comity now, when will they?
