Civility, why we need to cultivate it in America
Civility : noun [ci·vil·i·ty | \ sə-ˈvi-lə-tē]
plural : civilities
Definition of civility
1) Archaic usage: training in the humanities
2A: civilized conduct especially: courtesy, politeness bemoaned the decline of civility in our politics.
2B: a polite act or expression lacked the little civilities and hypocrisies of political society— Roy Jenkins. “The men briefly exchanged civilities before the meeting began”.
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The Problem:
Civility is a word that receives short shrift in America today. Seldom do we run across an article of any length that focuses on what is rapidly becoming a lost art in the United States of America. When we do, it is typically limited to a few brief sentences (truncated, no doubt, so as to not unduly challenge the attenuated attention span of most social media hangers-on).
Civility, upon an initial glance, seems to have an association with the word ‘civilisation’ and indeed it does, just as does the word ‘civics’ (the study of the rights and duties of citizenship), as both are now in a state of deplorable decline across all lines & classes of American society and culture.
Taking the setting to the everyday street, basic civility seems to be in full retreat everywhere. It is most notably absent in the entertainment business, where scripts, screenplays, movie plots and films are full to the brim with insulting, demeaning, scatological language and behavior. Advertising, that scrofulous prostitute of popular culture, reflects memes and mimicries of rudeness, disrespect, insults and all the appurtenances of uncivility…although couched in slightly less crude form, so as to please what few censor rules today apply to televised material.
Not a day goes by that is not highlighted (on television news programs) by reports of gang-related violence instigated due to a claimed case of ‘disrespecting’ (‘dissing’, in the vernacular), and occasionally a criminal perpetrator, when explaining why he attacked or killed another individual, will respond that he was angry for ‘bein’ dissed’.
Juveniles will start a fight simply because another kid was giving someone what we in Hawaii call ‘stink-eye’ (in most cases a pronounced or prolonged stare, which according to street smarts is considered disrespectful).
But these are merely just a few examples of the harder-case expression of rudeness among juveniles (or those with juvenile personalities, the so-called ‘arrested adolescent’ who may actually be in his 40s or 50s…more about this later).
In a more genteel context, we encounter ordinary rudeness and impoliteness almost every hour throughout the day. This can take many forms, including both direct (verbally abusive) or indirect (body-language and/or insinuative) expressions of disregard. Now that all of America (from age 16 on up) is enlisted in the motorized battalions of civilian armored vehicles (read: oversized automobiles and king-sized SUVs) that flood our streets and highways, rudeness and discourtesy have taken on an entirely new and more deadly nature, as the ignorant, impatient, narcissistic and insecure find new ways of threatening the health and safety of everyday Americans who dare (so they think) to impugn their self-perceived importance by daring to cross a street on foot, navigate a bike lane or walk safely along the side of a road that has no sidewalk.
These are but a few examples of a problem that is growing by leaps and bounds in our country today, perhaps the most egregious expression of which is the total breakdown of our national legislative processes to engage in cooperative, constructive and mutually symbiotic conversation. From the lowest levels of the gutter to the highest corridors of political, academic and civic discourse our regard for the rights and dignity of others has almost entirely broken down.
Whether it is an extreme leftist or rightist engaging in violence & belligerent rhetoric or simply someone immaturely racing you off the mark at a stop sign, discourtesy has now become an ingrained part of American life.
The Causes:
We are forced to ask ourselves a question that, like the three-legged, trunkless elephant in the room, is literally begging for an explanation and that question is ‘why are we becoming so utterly callous in our regard for the basic dignity and rights of others?’
The answer to that question is, as might well be imagined, neither simple nor straightforward, as there are many causative factors and dynamics that have brought this deplorable state of affairs into 21st Century commonality.
It’s almost too complex to really know where to start, although one thing is patently clear and that is that these factors have been synergistically combining over a long period of time to bring us to our present state of pre-meltdown dysfunction in America.
One of the factors is (and there seems to be little widely divergent disagreement here) that successive waves of ethnic diversity have (at least to a small but highly significant extent) helped create the present seething clash of values, opinions, polar attitudes and maladaptive behavioral excesses into being that we now suffer from. Whereas during the early 1900s heyday of the erstwhile ‘Great American Melting Pot’ philosophy the predominant majority of immigrants were of relatively uniform Northern European ethnicity with commonly shared cultural, religious and moral backstories (statistics demonstrate this quite clearly for anyone doubting the veracity of that assertion), today’s more modern flux of immigrants is anything but a sympathetic admixture of these ‘classically’ complementary factors. Color, race, creed, religion and behavioral traditions are now so widely at variance with those that predominated during the early 1900s that we might as well be living on an entirely different planet.
Further, whereas back in the first ‘melting pot’ phase of immigration to the United States there were strongly enforced and distinctly delineated rules, regulations and guidelines with which to adjudicate and control immigration, in today’s leftist progressive mindset, all rules and controls are, though still in many cases encoded law, practically no longer in effect. This potentially disastrous and socially disruptive mindset, that has become so whole-heartedly embraced by the hard core of new leftist radicals, threatens to overwhelm our existing national polity as these immigrants flagrantly flaunt the requirements and processes that exist to ostensibly regulate, modulate and govern who may or may not enter our nation seeking citizenship.
Unfortunately, progressives have an unfortunate habit of thinking that everyone who enters this country on a whim (discounting all the usual ‘I’m just trying to escape corruption, oppression, violence and bias in my own nation’ explanations) is a guileless, upstanding, morally pure, legitimate seeker after the ‘American Dream’ (a concept now so outmoded by our modern, rapacious economic commercialism that it no longer exists in recognizable or beneficial form). The fact is that a significant percentage of our ‘illegal’ immigrants are not all just impoverished mothers and wide-eyed children but hard-core social miscreants, pariahs, parasites, misanthropes and rejects (in this category, I include substance abusers and illegal drug cultivators, criminals and violent civil offenders). They automatically go into a covert self-protective mode once they’ve entered the country, making it as difficult as they can for authorities to locate, source-out and apprehend them. Worse yet, as their numbers grow, they have assumed the audacity to unite and proclaim that they somehow ‘deserve’ exactly the same rights & privileges as a legitimate citizen! California, the state of my birth, is regrettably a leader in adopting these attitudes, but other states are also following the same path towards unqualified universal suffrage for all, regardless…
It is, in my opinion, a path towards the obliterative abyss, presaging and heralding a collective breakdown of our society’s established norms as extremely polarized interest groups become more and more belligerent, eventually forsaking mere (civil disobedience) demonstrations for overt social violence (under the mottos of ‘inherent fairness’ and ‘rightful entitlement’). There have already been suggestions made that a new ‘uncivil war’ is no longer a remote possibility, with right-wing extremist groups almost neck and neck with so-called ‘anti-fascist’ (AntiFa) progressives in amping-up the incitement.
On a local level, another dynamic that is often overlooked is the fact that neighborhoods tend to be ‘democratic’ in their composition, due to laws that rigidly prohibit discrimination in real estate. While this may seem to be a positive factor, in reality it is a divisive state of affairs in that the range and breadth of residents is so great (in terms of ethnicity, habits, customs, practices, outlooks, education, social class and attitudes) that a person may have almost nothing in common with the immediate neighbors. When this degree of separation is combined with the negative socialization process that contemporary television ‘infotainment’ has become, no wonder there is so much social ‘shear effect’ being felt these days! Functional demographic homogeneity, formerly almost a norm of custom and practice, is today completely nonexistent, as one noteworthy consequence.
Still another factor in the fostering of social incivility (and perhaps one of the most influential) is the ‘infotainment’ industry, mentioned briefly above. In today’s America, cultural tone and taste are almost entirely a product of the information and entertainment resources available to citizens. These tastes are transferred predominantly through the media, social media itself being a completely separate yet equally powerful co-dynamic in this process. I speak here of the popular cultural tastes of the masses, tastes that are generated by Hollywood, which is the wellspring from which modern bastardised appetites and prurient preferences all spring. Visual entertainment media (films, television programming, and the ‘celebrity cult’ that has spawned from it) today is full of content aimed principally towards an immature, youthful and therefore highly impressionable audience, the causative motivation for which is exclusively profit generation.
It may well be asked “Why is this so bad?” and the answer to that is that in modern America, the traditional responsibility of providing guidance and counseling to offspring has been so completely abnegated by parents that adolescent morals, ethics and civics orientations now come not from the home but from audiovisual media (e.g. pop culture media, including films, videos and music). Since Hollywood and the entertainment industry could really care less about the deleterious effects of the egregiously banal trash it produces, it shamelessly exploits the titillations of sex, violence and irresponsibility, and promotes the already extant youthful ideal of rebelliousness in its themes and products.
Hollywood has had few limits placed on its actions towards this end in recent decades, pandering to youth and encouraging the worst traits of adolescent impressibility, because ever since Hollywood discovered the allure of reckless adolescent behavior as a box-office draw, it has dedicated the majority of its efforts towards fostering that objective. The post-war (WW2) bloom of prosperity in America that created a whole new class of adolescents with disposable income largely supported this development. Since youth haven’t acquired the normative constraints of mature adulthood, they’re wide-open to all forms of unconscionable exploitation. Hollywood, along with the entire commercial marketing apparatus in the US have accordingly dedicated their efforts towards exploiting that youthful vulnerability with merciless efficient precision.
The ‘reckless youth’ stereotype more or less began in the late 40s and early 50s, with iconic actors of irresponsible, immature rebelliousness setting the theme. Thus, Hollywood actors such as Marlon Brando, James Dean and a whole pantheon of ‘bad boy’ heroes emerged in films and entertainment. That, in combination with a long-existing American fascination with outlaws, criminals and crime, enabled Hollywood (and commerce) to carve out an entirely new slice of potential profit from the highly vulnerable adolescent population.
Another dynamic at work has been the wide-spread tendency in America to consider adolescents nothing less than ‘young adults’, which is a huge social error that has had tragic effects, since numerous neurological and behavioral studies have shown time and time again that true adult maturity sometimes comes along as late as the 30s! Far too many individuals today, who have suffered from a lack of sufficient parental restraint and mentoring guidance in their formative years today live in a state of what we call ‘arrested adolescence’. These are adults who may chronologically be in their 40s and 50s, but who still emulate the reckless irresponsibility of teenage days well into their true adulthood. You see these morons all around: adults just about everywhere you look who act childishly, manifesting youthful impatience and living out ego-centric, narcissistic behaviors as they interact with others.
Prior to the Second World War parents by and large insisted that their ‘children’ (a status that was formerly regarded as lasting up through high school) abide by varyingly strict rules of behavior. There were quite often severe consequences for any ‘child’ attempting to bend the parental rules and in the home, mother and father were powers to be reckoned with. Today, by contrast, parents literally allow their ‘children’ to do as they please, with few corrections or admonishments forthcoming. The latest child-development theory of ‘free-range parenting’ actually encourages children to set their own limits and make their own determinations about what is socially and experientially acceptable or not. Given the rampant absence of parental oversight and their access to all of the diverting and exploitative allure of modern electronic media aimed at profiting from their emotional vulnerability, is it no wonder that so many under the age of 50s are so totally focused on their immediate gratification and superficial desires, rather than on the merest vestige of what might be best for the collective social good?
In elbow-to-elbow lockstep with Hollywood and the entertainment industry is commercial marketing, also a primary ‘dredger’ of hormonally-redolent adolescent ‘oil’. Commercial marketing excess is one of the worst and most destructive aspects of modern American materialism and capitalistic commercialism, unfortunately, with no ‘commercial message’ airing without its dirty little hard-edge sell to promote thoughtless spending habits among the less reflective members of our society (e.g. youth and the ‘arrested adolescents’). It is little wonder that American capitalism sets the world standard for squanderous, materialistically superfluous excess.
Perhaps the best example of this that comes to mind are the automobile advertisements we see daily on television. They show the latest expensive automotive products being driven in a manner on urban streets and roadways that cannot be regarded by the most liberal criteria as anything less than unsafe, irresponsible and hazardous. In fact, Hollywood has even created a very profitable niche film cult around the ‘Fast & Furious’ movies, which glamorize this sort of extreme behavior in a manner that has tremendous appeal for young, immature (and therefore highly susceptible) individuals. Even more staid marques such as Subaru, which have an established reputation for quality and sensible all-season utility now features its most pedestrian products slaloming wildly around icy roads with all the adrenalin-tinged elan of moto-cross racing. And at the bottom of every TV (if we’re lucky) advertisement we may catch a quick glimpse of ‘Professional driver; closed course. Do not attempt this at home!’ As if that tiny nod to legal proprieties makes any difference to a young driver, eager to emulate this adrenalin-primed recklessness on his own!
This argument (that Hollywood should be forced to take responsibility for its youth-deluding action films) was broached (for the umpteenth time) in 2013 by Fox News reporter Holly McKay in an opinion piece entitled ‘Too fast & Furious: Some say Hollywood Should take More Responsibility for its Action Films.’ Of course, several proponents (read: apologist flacks for Hollywood’s excesses) immediately protested that, arguing that this would infringe Hollywood’s ‘creative license’. Oh! Poor babies! Making exciting films is more important than giving children proper perspective on the difference between reality and fantasy? Of course! That’s so obvious. How silly of me!
For this reason, Hollywood continues to excuse its execrable ethical and moral standards on the grounds that liberal application of creative license increases profits exponentially (QED) and refuses to take any arguments to the contrary seriously. Consequently, and in my considered (and usually fairly balanced) opinion, Hollywood should be taken out entirely with a well-placed thermonuclear missile, since how else does one medically cauterize a grossly festering wound? Perhaps we could make a deal with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un to borrow one of his and retarget it from Washington DC to Hollywood & Vine, in Southern California? D’ya suppose?
As mentioned earlier, now that adolescents themselves have gobs of money (either via credit cards or excessive parental ‘allowances’), they have been turned into obsessive fasionistas by intensely focused and well-researched commercial marketing campaigns. And as every advertising executive since the dawn of mercantilism knows, if youthful individuals have money, they can usually easily be conned out of it by clever commercial pandering to their self-centered and myopic desires (just as older individuals…euphemistically lumped together as ‘Seniors’…can be harvested by flooding the screen with the latest pharmacopeia products promising to relieve pain, ‘irregularity’ (read: ‘inability to shit on schedule’, lest there be any lingering misunderstanding of that term here) and the entire extensive menu of aging aches & afflictions. Again, parents seem both oblivious and disinterested in providing any guidelines for their children on how to resist this fleecing process by commercial business and consequently today’s youth are growing up to be the perfect little unquestioning consumers commercial business wants them to be.
Various academics and other erudite observers of the American social scene have, amidst much dramatic hand-wringing and make-believe angst, commented from time to time on this trend towards America becoming a less civil nation.
In 2011, Gregory Rodriquez wrote a brief piece titled ‘Our Civility Deficit’. In it he cited the widely-publicized brutal beating of a San Francisco Giants fan in the Dodgers Stadium parking lot, as well as the shooting of Gabby Giffords in Tucson (AZ), as examples of a discernibly growing tendency for Americans to abandon former limits of acceptable behavior and express their views in a violent manner. Rodriguez notes that democracy itself is a good part of the problem, for any society that is strongly founded on the right of individuals to have precedence over the common or collective good is going to have quite a challenge forcing a code of manners, behavior and responsibility on its citizens…let along get them to abide by its legal requirements.
As Rodriguez correctly notes, any society that conscientiously rejects class and traditional social distinctions as part of its basic doctrine lacks the sort of cultural homogeneity that presupposes any sort of infrastructure of ‘accepted manners’. Diversity as a modern doctrine that gets constant reference, both naturally and logically, contributes to this rampant heterogeneity from which the possibility for misunderstandings, reduced standards of respect and/or civil behavior arises.
Rodriquez quotes Frances Trollope, who in 1832 put this uniquely American problem into acute perspective: “Any man’s son may become the equal of any other man’s son; and the consciousness of this is certainly a spur to exertion. On the other hand, it is also a spur to that coarse familiarity, untampered by any shadow of respect, which is assumed by the grossest and lowest in their intercourse with the highest and most refined.”
Rodriquez further quotes an unidentified immigrant of that period (to the United States) who complained that “…civility cannot be purchased from Americans on any terms; they seem to think it is incompatible with freedom!” According to Yale law professor Stephen Carter, we Americans may have reached a particularly low point. Carter notes that, more and more these days, Americans are losing a sense of common, shared purpose, and along with it the generalized constraint that encourages politeness: “There are no bounds because there are no fellow passengers whose lives or hopes or needs we must respect.”
The particular challenge posed by youth:
It is a common complaint by many older individuals that ‘kids don’t have any respect anymore for their elders!’ But of course, children aren’t born with a sense of respect for others. Children are biologically programmed by nature from birth to selfishly manipulate their world to have their (self-perceived) needs met. Parents, therefore, are saddled with the important responsibility of teaching them how to satisfy these ‘needs’ by respectable and mutually acceptable means rather than socially unacceptable means. Unfortunately, parenting skills vary from excellent in a few to almost none in the vast masses and once commercial business interests made this connection, it wasn’t long before powerful marketing media forces were brought to bear on ‘molding’ children to conform to their own (marketing’s) standards of ‘acceptable behavior’ (read: spend money on materialist commercial products, without any regard for socially appropriate wisdom).
In today’s mass consumer society that America has devolved into, it is no longer parents that provide normative socialization but commercial business interests. The old schism between ‘wants & needs’ has become so blurred by commercial marketing forces that children have become little more than ‘consumers in training’ as their parents, badgered, pressured, bothered, stressed out and overextended drop out of the process entirely.
Modern American media, both commercial and ‘social’ types, have become so influential in dictating taste and standards of desirability in youth that it should cease to amazes anyone why our modern youth are increasingly little narcissistic paragons of insatiable self-centeredness, immature insularities and antisocial attitudes.
Once again, we can level the finger of blame for much of this directly and unhesitatingly at the ‘usual culprits’ of American society: 1) materialism as a firm & underlying philosophy of unbridled American consumerism, 2) Hollywood and the so-called ‘infotainment’ industry, and 3) the electronic and advertising media that functions as the ‘enforcement’ arm of infotainment.
As mentioned earlier in this paper, over the decades following the Second World Word and concurrent with America’s exponential economic growth consequent therefrom, we have come to regard adolescents as nothing less than ‘small adults’, when in fact there are properly regarded as ‘larger children’. With all that disposable income they have acquired (however it may have been acquired) they have become the prime target of both entertainment and commercial business, which has in almost every instance resorted to cheap and sleezy means of drawing youthful ‘suckers’ in: pandering to youthful rebelliousness and ‘bad behavior’.
Starting with the first youth films of the 50s, social rebels such as personified by Marlon Brando (the first of hundreds) have set the tone for entertainment aimed at youth. It is, of course, a classic case of ‘co-option’ in that Hollywood responds to accusations of reckless disregard for youth’s morals by parroting a familiar response: “We just give them what they want!” Yes, perhaps, but only well after instilling that spirit of youthful rebelliousness and irresponsibility in every movie, film and/or television series ever to come out of the SoCal film colony, where it has successfully sowed the seeds that sprout into the typical full-blown social anarchy of youthful angst.
This same excuse is used by just about every commercial marketing organization you can think of, including the automotive industry, with its unceasingly unhealthy emphasis on speed, horsepower and reckless driving attitudes. “We’re not advocating recklessness by youth, we’re just portraying it!” Right.
Most regrettably, in a cruel joke of nature played upon us human beings, politicians are, as we all know, born without spinal columns (although it is definitely untrue according to several marine biologists I am acquainted with that politicians as a species are directly evolved from jellyfish). They therefore almost uniformly lack the guts to stand up and fight for standards of decency and ‘right-thinking’ behavior (with regard to issues involving commercialism’s gross lack of concern for shouldering the merest fragment of social responsibility) on the basis of what’s actually good for society. And why is that? Because their campaign advisors tell them they might ‘offend’ some three-brain-cell idiot who won’t help reelect them in the next political campaign for office by taking an unpopular (and often moronic) stance of issues!
Therefore, we cannot depend on our elected representatives to think logically and react with appropriate moral reasoning and ethical clarity when it comes to putting the bite on the sinister motivations of commerce, entertainment and related social ‘vices’ that are helping cause all these problems.
There is another joker in this particular pack of cards and that is social media, a dynamic that has been enabled by the exponential growth of electronic communications, that by virtue of its direct, speed-of-light nature, virtually eliminates any parental adjudication of wild youthful impulses and allows these ‘large children’ to not only communicate with each other, but to establish their own standards of behavior and co-operative social interaction!
This is analogous to putting a child in charge of a candy store, or installing an alcoholic as the head of the Federal ATF Bureau. The result of this unhappy confluence of synergizing forces has been that adolescents have seized upon the exploitation-driven promptings of commercialism and Hollywood, adopted and perfected them amongst themselves. We see this every day in youthful idolizing of anti-social, high-profile and misanthropic social models (i.e. ‘bad-boy’ images, anti-social rebelliousness, youth and drug gang behavior, obnoxious entertainment celebrities, scatological hip-hop and gangsta-rap, et al). The example of ‘Eminem’ comes directly to mind. It is a disturbing development at best and a socially catastrophic catalyst at worst.
When we examine the trends (for example, that of parents failing to act as responsible, mentoring parents and abnegating family leadership issues) we find another unsetting factor at play. This works, once again, right back into the commercial marketing part of the social playing field where ‘scientific breakthroughs’ and the latest marvels of medical biogenetics have suckered fully grown, mature adults into the belief that perpetual youthfulness is a sort of achievable, desirable and preferable state of being that all fully grown adults should aspire to (whether they are older adults or not). Obviously, no one wants to grow old and die, so the most lucrative advertising effort being made by commercial medical snake-oil salesmen and the pharmaceutical companies is one in which adults are conned into thinking that youthfulness is more desirable than mature, adulthood. This is accomplished by heavy marketing of commercial products that promise eternal youth for the cost of a $5 bottle of something-or-other (‘health in a bottle’, the oldest scam in the world).
Accordingly, armed with this message, commercialism and Hollywood jointly communicate the message, sometimes covertly and sometimes overtly, that perpetual adolescence is preferable to mature adulthood…a message that strikes a resonant cord of sympathy in many adults, encouraging them to morally defer to their children’s attitudes, outlooks and behavioral standards.
Thus, we have what is called the ‘arrested adolescent’, a curious manifestation of modern American culture, who although he/she may be in his 50s or 60s, dresses like a youth, has behavioral affectations like a youth and emulates or reflects the fleeting fascinations of youthful immaturity. These ‘adult-children’ may be found even so far advanced as to be in their 60s, although by the time successive decades of aging have had their inevitable ‘come-to-Jesus’ impacts, the basic lie of this ‘eternal youthfulness’ premise that commerce promises has worn pretty thin!
If these 70-year-old, strappy-bra Lady Gagas and reversed-ball-cap, pot-bellied seniors could just see themselves from a certain remove, one would hope that they could still get a small sense of how ludicrous they appear, not just to their more sensible ‘senior’ peers but to the youths they so obviously wish they still were! Reality check to these people: It ain’t gonna happen, folks. Wrinkly-skinned older people with chicken-gizzard necks generally DO NOT look good in skin-tight Lycra leggings, Under-Armor briefs and so forth. (Internet jokes about ‘Wal-Martians naturally come to mind, here…forgive me!)
But to return to the complaint of so many older people that youth do not respect them. Really? Do they expect adolescents to seriously respect a geezer who gives painfully embarrassing evidence of wanting to be 40 years younger than time and fate has made them?
One is tempted to say that it is long past time for mature adults to start dressing like, acting like and accepting the fact that they are mature adults, rather than handy ‘real-consumer, not an actor’ testimonials for the perpetual youth con-men, with their fountain-of-youth products and endless youthfulness products.
In going over all of the foregoing, it starts to seem pretty obvious (to me, at least) that the present status of civic manners being on the endangered qualities list of disappearing American traits is attributable to a number of dynamic forces that are more or less all addressable and even correctable.
Another common expression that we often hear these days is one coming from marginal individuals in the lower depths of society who feel they are somehow being ‘disrespected’ by others. Stories about gang-members who have killed peers for this reason (as they often explain it to authorities) are encountered on the evening news almost every day. Strangely enough, they feel that somehow, in some way they are entitled to respect simply by virtue of being who and what they are. They fail to understand that, normally, respect is earned and not something one is born with. Civic standards of politeness to the contrary, no one is born with ‘certain rights’ such as freedom, respect, wealth, health or any other self-engendered entitlement. These are all traits & characteristics that need to be socially earned, like Boy Scout merit badges.
But of course, in a ‘democracy’ such as ours is in America, we contradict those laws of nature by instituting codes of social interaction (such as courtesy, politeness and basic human acknowledgement), as we must to prevent our fragile, if tenuously maintained, ‘civilisation’ from degenerating into the abject social chaos it could quickly become. All well and good, naturally.
Janet Lehman, who holds a Masters in Social Welfare, delves into the subject of ‘disrespect’ in a paper she wrote titled ‘Do Your Kids Respect You?’ In it, she has some very useful observations to share on how to restore your worth as an older and theoretically wiser adult among your own children. One of these is to remember that parents are categorically not their children’s ‘best friend’. He or she is your child, essentially a blank slate that needs to be filled in with important guidelines on how to grow up and mature into full adulthood (a process that psychology and neurology experts generally agree takes about 30 years, believe it or not!). Eventually, after several decades, you may indeed become your child’s best friend, but not until he or she has grown into a fully mature adult.
Another point Lehman makes with regard to good parenting is that, just as in training puppies, good training starts early and it must remain consistent at least through the teen-years. Catching tendencies towards being disrespectful in children must begin at the earliest age and be dealt with firmly and unrelentingly (that is not to say unkindly, however). Correction of disrespectful behavior is not successful in the heat of any argument wherein an adult yields to anger and thereby falls from the pedestal of calm maturity to become a child him or herself. Good social interaction skills begin with an understanding of the basic ground-rules of polite society that include calmness, mutual respectfulness and appropriate setting. Simple, courteous phrases like ‘please’, ‘thank you’ and ‘excuse me’ are the cornerstone of parental instruction on communicating to children how to behave appropriately around others. Speaking personally, I find myself totally amazed every time a child or adolescent I encounter in a store uses a simple word or two like that. My stunned look must be puzzling to them, but it is so gratifying to observe this evidence of a well-brought-up youth in daily life, after being so used to the sort of rude, boorish or selfish behavior that so often passes for it.
Finally, Lehman makes the argument that the worst thing a parent can do is to take a child’s behavior, remarks, comments and or statements personally. It is critically important to remember that one is not dealing with a grown-up, rationally logical adult, but a child or adolescent that is still uncertain of the limits of acceptable behavior.
To be a child is to be rebellious and to be provocative, hateful, manipulative and cajoling, since all of these behaviors are merely part of a child’s quiver of tools to enable him/her to get what he /she wants. The challenge is to remain as objective as possible at all times and to resist the urge to become as subjectively juvenile (in one’s arguments) as the child.
Lehman closes with the advice that regardless of what extent they may protest, ALL children really do want limits. Limits are vital guidelines that help shape adult attitudes and serve as correctional reality checks in a child’s daily interactions with others. And why do they want limits to be set? Because the setting of limits is an intangible but perceptible indication of being loved and wanted (the two things all children want and need most).
In summary
All of the foregoing is a casual effort to underscore the fact that civil interaction in American is indeed on the decline and that it is a manifestation of a number of dynamics factors, some amendable, some not so much (such as ‘diversity’). At the very end of this I have included a short selection of some very worthwhile papers and articles that deal more substantively with the subjects of civil courtesy, engenderment of respect among individuals and in certain areas of American life wherein civility must be regarded as a matter of vital importance, if we are to succeed as a nation in the future.
The founder of the Civility Initiative at Johns Hopkins University, Pier M. Forni, suggest that asking people to hew to standards of civility is not enough in-and-of itself. He cites the Henry James standard. James observed that “Only three things in life are important: The first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind!”
One does not need to be a believer in Christianity (or any other religion that promotes humane morality and standards of ethical behavior) to practice that admonishment. For kindness is its own reward and it may well be the basic stuff whereby people can be drawn together in mutual harmony and sameness of purpose.
‘Harmony and sameness of purpose?’ On 21 January 1812, Thomas Jefferson wrote the following words to John Adams that could serve as inspiration for today’s vehemently opposed political figures who at present have fallen into a state of utter, interactive dysfunction and who clearly and urgently need to return to some vestige of polite and mutually civil discourse:
“A letter from you calls up recollections very dear to my mind. It carries me back to the times when, beset with difficulties and dangers, we were fellow laborers in the same cause, struggling for what is most valuable to man, his right of self-government. Laboring always at the oar, with some wave ever ahead threatening to overwhelm us and yet passing harmlessly under our bark, we knew not how, we rode through the storm with heart and hand, and made a happy port.”
In my opinion, we all could surely use a good, health dose of Thomas Jefferson right about now!
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A few excellent resources on civility for further consideration:
1) ‘How did American Politics Lose its Civility?’, By Robt. Bradford, Autumn 2016.
2) ‘Civility in America’, Weber Shandwick, 2010. (There are several excellent articles available at the Weber Shandwick site on American civility).
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