Without good manners, human society becomes intolerable and impossible." George Bernard Shaw
What, in the name of civilisation, has happened to people's manners?
And when I say manners, I don’t mean using the correct knife and fork or keeping your elbows off the table, I mean civility and common courtesy, the bedrock of a successful society and part of the glue that holds it together. What ever happened to giving up your seat to a pregnant lady, saying please and thank you, and following the basic rules that make society possible? As a rule, I am opposed to rules; however, if we all try to get onto the bus together instead of forming a queue, mayhem ensues.
That the transport authority in Ireland felt the need to introduce a ‘Baby on Board’ badge for expectant mothers to indicate to other travellers that they may be in greater need of a seat during their commute speaks volumes. It seems that demonstrations of courtesy and respect are old-fashioned and left the building along with the 20th century. In my day, we’d be falling over ourselves to offer our seats on the bus to the elderly or infirm. Indeed, I recall a young boy many years ago offering me his seat. Nice manners, but I was only 41 at the time!
Travelling by bus last week, I witnessed a fine display of this modern cult of meism and entitlement with one passenger occupying the aisle seat and placing his bag on the window seat so that another passenger had to request him to move the bag and then squeeze past him to sit down, while another sat at the back playing games on his phone at a volume clearly audible to the rest of us. Of course nobody, including me, called him out, for such is the state of our society that you’d likely as not get a punch for your trouble.
And don’t get me started on social media! Where have all these self-righteous, overbearing people come from? There was a time when it was okay to have differing viewpoints. We might not agree with someone, but we’d give them a hearing without becoming defensive or responding with vitriol and name-calling. It seems these days one doesn't need an informed or educated opinion, for defending one’s position is more likely to require a loud voice than a good argument.
Perhaps you consider these trivial matters and think I’m just an old Biddy viewing the past with rose-coloured spectacles like many old Biddy’s before me, but it seems to me that a society in which we no longer afford each other even a modicum of respect is a society on a downward spiral.
On the positive side...actually, I can see no positive side. It’s the end of the world as we know it...and I feel fine.
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