People Suck
Or, why is civility taking such a beating these days?
If politics is downstream from culture, then culture is downstream from character. And right now, we have a character crisis in America. It’s often characterized as a civility crisis.
“In a study of 1,000 American adults during the pandemic, 48 percent of adults and 55 percent of workers said that in November 2020, they had expected that civility in America would improve after the election,” the New York Times reports. “By August, the expectations of improvement had fallen to 30 percent overall and 37 percent among workers. Overall, only 39 percent of the respondents said they believed that America’s tone was civil.” And no surprise: “The study also found that people who didn’t have to work with customers were happier than those who did.”
I’m a confirmed introvert, so I feel as if I can say this with some authority: PEOPLE SUCK. Not people I know and like, of course, but people as a concept. Call me a downer, but people can be rude, crude, impolite, unfriendly, and just downright asshole-like. Sure, there are exceptions; there always are, but if the Trump era has shown me anything, it’s that assholes think they rule the world, and they have no problem letting you know about it.
It’s their world, and they’d be just as happy if you weren’t living in it. How else do you explain the crowds at Trump rallies wearing the “FUCK YOUR FEELINGS!!” t-shirts? They’re letting you know right up front that they don’t give a damn about you. They don’t care what you want or what you think. As far as they’re concerned, you can shove a leaf blower up your backside and fly to the moon.
Of course, those are the ones who are overt and upfront about their assholery (is that even a word?). So at least you know what you’re getting when you run across those misanthropes. But the worst breed of asshole is the passive/aggressive type, the ones who, unbeknownst to everyone but themselves, are a powder keg just looking for a place and a reason (and enough alcohol) to go off. They’re the ones who sit quietly on an airplane until a flight attendant reminds them that wearing a facemask is federal law. Then they detonate, and anyone within a 15-foot blast radius is liable to get hit with something.
Perhaps it’s the way I was raised and the time I spent as an Army officer, but I use “sir” and “ma’am” a lot, and it doesn’t matter to whom I’m speaking. I try to be polite, smile, and say “yes, sir” or “yes, ma’am”- even if it’s “just” the person filling the gas tank of my car or ringing up my gorceries. I’ve never thought that treating someone with respect was too much or too difficult. It’s really quite easy.
Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible to be kind.
The Dalai Lama
My point is that I try very hard not to think, act, or speak as if I’m better than anyone else- because I’m not. And you can catch a lot more flies with honey than you ever will with vinegar.
There’s a lot of frustration in this world, and many people aren’t managing the frustration in their lives very well. I can’t believe that people decided to be assholes because it makes them feel good. It takes a considerable amount of negative energy to be grossly rude or impolite, and over time I suspect that wears a person down. It's no wonder so many people are so tired all the time- they get caught in an endless cycle of frustration and reaction. Lashing out at someone because they’re frustrated doesn’t solve anything. It does, however, make even more people frustrated, angry, and exhausted.
Sure, I’ve had my share of road rage moments, and I’m working on that. I want to think I’m better than I used to be, but there’s always room for improvement.
It would be convenient to blame covid-19 or Donald Trump, but the problem started long before either became a national blight. Back in 2013, studies were warning that “civility in America continues to disintegrate and rude behavior is becoming the ‘new normal.’" The report “Civility in America 2019” found that 93 percent of Americans identified incivility as a problem; 68 percent considered it a “major” one, and 74 percent thought it was getting worse.
“Incivility,” which one associates with minor social infractions or foul language, doesn’t really capture the enormity of the crisis, though. Airline passengers assaulting flight attendants, parents threatening school board members, customers haranguing store clerks or fellow shoppers — these have all become common occurrences. Scholarly studies document increased hostility in the workplace, too.
Author and columnist Tom Nichols has been writing for years about “a long trend of rising narcissism and a sense of entitlement that was enabled by peace, prosperity, and rapidly improving living standards.” We’ve become impatient, selfish, self-absorbed and increasingly violent — all before the pandemic. The coronavirus merely worsened the problem by fueling a surge in mental and stress-related illness.
The idea that we as a society have “become impatient, selfish, self-absorbed and increasingly violent” may well be a product of living in a culture in which we’ve become accustomed to not waiting. For anything. We get meals instantly through drive-through lanes. Pizzas are delivered in 30 minutes or less. We get our eyeglasses in one hour. Credit decisions are made instantly. American society has grown accustomed to virtually instant gratification, and being made to wait for anything can be a source of considerable frustration.
When I got divorced in 1989, I bought myself a Macintosh SE. Before the Internet was a thing, doing anything online meant dialing into a computer system over a telephone line at the “blazing” speed of 1200 baud. You remember just how slow that is if you’re of a certain age. If you’re not, you don’t want to know. In the time it took to download a file, I could (no exaggeration) take a shower, make a sandwich, and sit back down with plenty of time to spare.
Now, if downloading a file takes more than a second or two, I’m drumming my fingers on my desktop and wondering what’s taking so frickin’ long. Something very similar has happened with American life over the past 30-plus years. We’re living life at a much faster pace- and that’s not always a good thing. That speed can create a good deal of stress.
In our I-want-it-yesterday, get-it-done-immediately world, there’s often little time to slow down and smell the flowers. So if you’re running from the time you get out of bed until you crawl exhausted back into it, how do you enjoy life?
Our expectations (instant, perfect service, no matter how unreasonable the demand) are out of whack not only with pandemic-stricken America but really any society under the best of conditions. Flights get canceled. Stores run out of merchandise. Obscure items take time to get delivered. Our capacity for inconvenience is as small as our national attention span — and both have been shrunk by social media that prods us to anger. For every Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene banned from Twitter, there’s an army of equally offensive users.
Understandably, parents have been frustrated by school shutdowns. But fury at schools is disproportionate and entirely unfair. Imagine if schools had continued in person pre-vaccine and children had died.
We want life to be smooth- no traffic, red lights, or waiting lines at our favorite coffee shop- but life seldom works like that. If we lack coping mechanisms to help us deal with the frustrations and setbacks, frustration and anger are bound to be expressed, often at very inconvenient moments.
We all have our breaking points, but many lack the self-awareness to recognize where that point is. This may account for why so many seemingly “normal” people freak out on airplanes, in school board meetings, in grocery stores or…well, you get the idea.
Civility isn’t a challenging concept to wrap one’s head around. It’s primarily about recognizing that none of us can know what battles another person may be fighting, and so kindness should be the order of the day. It’s about putting the Golden Rule to good use- treat someone the same way you’d hope they’d treat you. There’s nothing complicated or challenging about it; in fact, it’s pretty easy. Kindness takes little effort or energy, and it’s a virtually inexhaustible resource.
I’m not as good at kindness as I’d like to be, but I’m working on it, and I like the way I feel at the end of a day when I’ve been successful. It makes me want to keep trying to be a better person…’cuz I know I’ve got a long way to go, but at least I don’t end my days exhausted and frustrated.
It’s what happens when you slow down and practice kindness whenever possible.
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