Connie Leatherman said she doesn’t hear “please” and “thank you” much anymore. She doesn’t hear it when she lets someone cut in front of her in line at the grocery store. She doesn’t see it in a friendly wave for letting someone into traffic.
And cell phones. Don’t get the St. Joseph woman talking about cell phones. She even hates the one she owns.
“I think they’re terrible. I think people’s driving has gotten way worse because they’ve got a cell phone glued to the side of their head,” Ms. Leatherman said. “I’ve got one, but I don’t like them.”
Rudeness. Incivility. Those are the words that many feel describe the zeitgeist of our times. Perhaps we are in a time where rudeness and disrespectful behavior are the norm. Maybe we’re at a place and time where cussing is the national language and cell phones are our national symbol.
“Leave It to Beaver” and “Father Knows Best” — gentle, humorous sitcoms from the 1950s — have been replaced by “Roseanne” and “Family Guy,” shows that get laughs from rude and crass behavior. Our comedians, like Sarah Silverman and Lisa Lampanelli, use racist and sexist put-downs as humor.
We vote people off islands, we write hateful responses on blog sites, and talk radio is just an airwave highway for our road rage.
In 2006, ABC News took a poll on rudeness in America. The poll showed that 87 percent of Americans ranked annoying cell phone calls as the rudest of behaviors. This was followed by being rude and disrespectful, using bad language and using cell phone or e-mails in mid-conversation.
Blame cell phones, the economy, the war, the TV shows, the music, our kids or whatever. Many people feel we’re ruder and more uncivil today than we were yesterday.
Dr. Shirley Taylor, a licensed psychologist for Heartland Health Counseling Services, said she noticed the trend 20 years ago.
“I remember when I first saw ‘The Roseanne Show,’ actually, ‘The Bill Cosby Show,’ too,” she said. “There was a certain snootiness, a certain rudeness that really surprised me. In the popular culture, it was there, and I know that they always say that the media reflects the culture.”
Dr. Taylor said rudeness has always been with us. But it may be more crass today than it was 100 years ago. The classic put-downs of Mark Twain, Dorothy Parker and Ambrose Bierce had a cleverness that’s missing now.
“Now, words seem to club another person over the head. There’s not a cleverness or subtlety about it,” Dr. Taylor said. “We’re so clever, we say, ‘Screw you.’”
Many professionals believe the rudeness and crass behavior we’re experiencing today are the fruits of the 1960s freedom movement and liberal child-rearing philosophy of Dr. Benjamin Spock that was popular in the 1950s.
Dr. Spock was an American pediatrician, whose 1946 book, “Baby and Child Care,” championed permissive parenting. He believed that instead of strict discipline and corporal punishment, children should be reared with more understanding of their needs and wants.
“I think his book and the child-rearing that grew out of that probably took us to a place we needed to go,” Dr. Taylor said. “But maybe we need a correction now, where we don’t raise children with it all being about them, where we need to have a sense of more cooperation and respect for the other guy.”
Nancy Irwin, a Los Angeles psychotherapist and author, believes cell phones, e-mail and texting make us more self-centered.
“Technology can give us a false sense of being in control, to the exclusion of others’ needs or responses. The massive numbers of ‘connections’ we make now are disposable in a nano-second, void of any consideration deeper than the immediate need,” she said.
Dr. Ken Hines, a St. Joseph psychologist, said there was a time when we were taught manners in school and at home. Today, he said, we’ve become so hooked on instant gratification and so oblivious to the rights of others that we say some pretty horrible and hateful things.
“It is tempting to blame the cell phone and modern conveniences that are taken for granted,” he added. “But I believe the trend precedes the mechanisms of texting and chatting and getting back. I have noted increases in people talking aloud in movie theaters and at staged productions over the last 20 years.”
Dr. Hines added that new media, such as texting, Facebook and the like, merely capitalize on some primitive characteristics within us. Those socializing tools allow those characteristics to be expressed with little or no regard to importance or consequence.
“One of the hallmarks of being civilized is learning our proper place in the bigger picture, how to be considerate and thoughtful of others, how to behave in a civilized manner and how to feel when we have failed to behave properly and like we are supposed to,” he said.
Julie Frantz is owner and instructor of Everyday Etiquette, a Belvidere, Ill., organization that makes presentations on manners and social skills for schools and businesses. She also believes the rudeness phase began with the permissiveness of the 1960s. But she sees an increase in people wanting to learn better social skills.
“If all of us looked upon ourselves as agents of change, we need to all be moving toward building a better country that is going to be based on a foundation of civility,” she said. “We’re going to be kind, we’re going to be polite, we’re going to look out for each other. Courtesy and kindness are absolutely free.”
Billie Blair, president and chief executive officer of Change Strategists Inc., a California consulting firm, has a different take on rudeness. She says we need to be ruder.
Dr. Blair says we’ve become a nation of timid people who are afraid to say what we think. Most of it is a phony courteousness that puts us at a global disadvantage, when most of the world’s population is not so politically correct.
“Baby boomers are probably the major offenders. We are probably the ones who got this all started, being nice to one another, a completely phony way to be,” she said. “We spend so much time going around and around the barn, trying to say things gently so we won’t offend anybody at all.”
Dr. Blair says rudeness is really based on how a person perceives it. We have a choice to decide whether we’re offended.
“I think we need to encourage people to speak their case clearly, and if that comes across as rude, then there is a discussion there to have,” she said. “I suggest we need to get a plane higher than that, and not be so concerned about these things.”
Alonzo Weston can be reached
at alonzow@npgco.com.