Larry’s Lollygaggings
Volume I, Number 4
18 October 2008
Just thinking about…Civility
It took me 40 years, but I am finally at peace with the fact that I AM MY FATHER. There. I said it. It’s out there in the world. That is my admission to everyone that what I swore never would happen has indeed happened. Now everyone knows. Except my wife, Martha. If you see her, please don’t mention it.
What I am especially referring to is my life of listening to Dad’s descriptions about what life was like when he was a kid and how ‘now-a-days’ (which is now then-a-days) was rotten. I knew that everything was getting better. He knew everything was getting worse. I think neither of us was right – everything is getting, well, different.
I think so so so much now IS better. Not everything, but a lot. Then, I went on a run with the wonderful Josh Nemzer. While running up the Newton Hills on the Boston Marathon Course, we stumbled on a discussion about the state of our country’s civility, or lackthereof, today and it got me thinking. So, I want to point out some of my main concerns regarding where civility in our world is (the gutter) and where it is going (the sewer).
First up – technology. Ahhh, the wonders of technology. Technology is like a child. When taken care of with care and concern it makes life better. When ab-used and taken for granted – look out! For example; it wasn’t long ago that if you were out and about and needed to make a call, you had to find a phone booth and have a dime.
**NOTE: if you are unfamiliar with the term phone booth or have never used cash for any purchase, there will be a tutoring session that covers that information as well as trivial wonders of the past such as portable radios, VHS & Betamax tapes, leaded gasoline, typewriters, passing notes in class, cooking in ovens, and afterschool, unscheduled, random, unsanctioned, choose-up-sides, no referees, honest to G-d ‘pick-up’ basketball games.
Now, we complain like second-graders when recess is cancelled ‘due to muddy playground’ if we have bad cell coverage, a dropped call, or poor reception. When I was 21, not enough bars meant something completely different than it does today. So here we are, having evolved to the point of being irate because we are inconvenienced and unable to find out, while travelling at 75 miles per hour in Mumbledeegook, Montana, exactly what lamppost my buddy is standing under for our meeting. I HATE being inconvenienced regarding the things I have become so comfortable taking for granted (read that line again…I love it). That reminds me of my wife. But that is for another blog. I can hardly remember what it was like to arrange a meeting time and place, describe what you were wearing and actually LOOK for the person instead of talking to them on the phone until you are actually touching noses before you hang up. On that note, did you ever notice how when that happens, you still say goodbye even though you immediately follow it with a handshake hello?
These phones can do everything! I can’t. But the phone, when in the careful hands of a properly trained, experienced 8 year old, can seemingly do it all. I forget to zip my fly and 8 seconds later it’s on YouTube with a link to a homepage of me adjusting wedgies! What’s more is that they are each rated and commented on in a forum. By the time I finish writing this blog, there will be a Larry Wedgie Fan Club on Facebook.
There was a time when I could remember every phone number of every person I met. Now that I have speed dialing, auto dialing, picture dialing, and voice recognition, I don’t NEED to remember any numbers. So I CAN’T remember any numbers! Last month I lost my phone and couldn’t even recall enough information to call my parents! People ask me how old I am and I have to check my PDA! If I only knew the auto-encrypted secret password key that I created so my kids couldn’t see adult things on my computer I might be able to access that vital statistic. But, lo, they are the only ones who can recall what the passwords are so I can watch adult things on my computer. You know it’s getting out of hand when I need my dog’s help to put my mother on hold so I can receive a fax while speeding on I-95.
People have lost their sense of civility through texting and email. It is so terrible that we can’t even talk anymore. The lost art of conversing. Soon, universities across our great country will offer courses or even major fields of study in human recognition and simple communication. As a society, we’ve stopped meeting. Then stopped calling. Then stopped using complete words in our text messaging. Punctuation? Are you kidding? My daughter couldn’t understand why she got essay points off in school for writing a 250 word essay without any vowels and thought starting her concluding paragraph with IMHO was completely proper. (IMHO=In My Humble Opinion for all you uncultured swine that have not seen Legally Blonde on Broadway).
So, we don’t talk to our friends or family anymore. And strangers? On an elevator? On a plane? On a train? Oh, come on! Forget it, Sam I Am. We ignore the airplane safety talk. I’d love to see an emergency where the flight attendant won’t help you because you ignored her schpeil about how to open the seatbelt. (I spell checked ‘schpeil’ and ‘schlemiel’ was the only thing that came up. Holy Laverne & Shirley!)
We’ve even lost our basic form of outgoingness (is that a word?)…people don’t wear watches anymore. They use their cell phone to get the time. So, since nobody, even the homeless, is without a cell phone, we don’t even talk to strangers to ask the time. I used to like giving the time and meeting someone new. A little, tiny good deed that made me feel like I helped someone in some way. Oh, well. Another smack in the head for civility.
Speaking of phones, here is a true story. One of my favorites.
A few years ago, my brother, Jan, and his teenage daughters returned from a vacation and could not find where they had left the cordless phone in the house. Since it was left off of the cradle, it had a dead battery and they could not use the dummy-finder-beepie-beepie button on the base. So, they searched. And searched. They looked for an hour, turning over pillows and cushions, looking under and over everything in the house. After the futile hour passed, my 14 year old niece, Bethanie said she had a great idea for an invention. “Dad, they should make a string that goes from the phone to the base. That way, it would never get lost!” “Yes.” Jan said, “They used to have that. They called it a PHONE!”
While I’m on cordless phones; in my house, the only place they are certain NOT to be, is on the charger. We have 38 phones at home and none are charged. I bet right now they are all dead and sitting next to the charger instead of in it. Trust me, don’t take that bet. You can’t find a seat on a couch in my house without sitting on a receiver. My butt had dialed 911 more times than Brittany Spear’s housekeeper. When I hear a ring in my house, I am trained to stand and run AWAY from the chargers to find the phones since running towards them only entices frustration.
On the same note, we don’t ask for directions. We use Mapquest or a GPS. I now have to ignore the lady on the GPS box since she has replaced Martha in giving me directions. All I need now is a more realistic one that says, “DING. I told you so. DING. You should have turned back there. DING. Now you can figure it out by yourself. DING. I’m just going to shut myself off. DING. In one mile, prepare to drop dead, Mr. Knowitall.”
Forget about the Brooklyn Voice or Jersey Attitude option.
Getting back to the after school games, we used to get off the bus, grab our bat, glove and assorted balls, and run to Steven Hirschberger’s house so we would be there before teams were picked. He had the biggest yard. You would bring everything because nobody knew what we would play that day. It was usually whatever the season was at that time, but we might play anything…or everything! The only constant was that the games would last until dark. Then dinner, homework and bed.
Now, my kids have lives choreographed with standards so exacting that their days look more like a Bob Fosse production of All That Jazz than the Peanuts cartoon that my childhood actually paralleled. They have play ‘dates’ where the collection of participants and order of activities is coordinated like the engineering and building of the Maginot Line. Then there is class after class, league upon league, lessons on top of lessons. Martha never leaves a 5 mile radius from our house, but still manages to put in 100 miles of driving every day. Sam does homework in the car while waiting for a Emily’s Oriental Ribbon Curling Class to be through. Brian changes into proper Wii video gear during Sam’s Puberty Training Classes at the YMCA. Shortly thereafter, Emily has dinner on the hood of the car while Brian attends orientation for the All-Star Travelling Lego Building Club. No wonder why I find Martha having long, meaningful conversations with her coffee mug. Her afternoons are the mental equivalent of Fred Flintstone’s closet.
This lack of creating games, rules and teams has made us quite anti-social. We are a society void of understanding and appreciating body language, voice inflection and emotion. We are forcing and being forced to assume what the other person meant when they sent that text, email, etc. without the option of simply asking what in the world they really meant when they said such-and-such.
Actually, it goes so much further than that. So far that there are actually websites where you can use a one-time email address that is deactivated forever after your one faceless use. That way, weenies everywhere can hide while they make comments about others that are cowardly, untrue, and non-debatable! Not that I’m taking this one personally, but I do NOT chew like a cow and I absolutely DID wear blue socks and black pants last week on purpose. I was making a point, mrshelpfulgal@aol.com!
All of this lack of face time causes our society to think the following things are not only acceptable, but courteous, behavior.
- The clerk yelling for the next customer when I am the only doshgarm person in the bakery.
- Forcing me to drag my kid up to the register for ID proof so I can have the honor of buying an overpriced under 10 wacky meal filled with trans fat high fructose bleeeech when all he really wants is the toy. (The toy is healthier to eat than the food.)
- Then, I have to pass some six point background check before they will accept my signature as being my signature. Seems to me that if I wanted to commit fraud, I’d do it for something heartier that a Filet-o-Fish sandwich.
- We talk on the phone while ordering and mouth our detailed wants and needs to the counterperson as though they were lip-sync-ologists. It’s like the whole world is Milli Vanilli! And seriously, what is so important about your call that it can’t be put on hold for 12 seconds while you map out your size and style of slushie? Are you relaying the formula for cold fission to Mrs. Pactwa’s Odyssey of the Mind Team?
- Responding to my “Thank you” with an “uh-huh”. And an uninspired “uh-huh” at that! At least sometimes I get some vocal inflection…as though that was being courteous. It’s not.
- Clerks asking “how are you today” with a level of enthusiasm on par with a comatose carrot. So uninspired are they, that when I answer anything other than “fine”, like “superdeedooper”, I get a look more puzzled than that of seeing Jimmy Swaggart at Miss Lily’s Jiggle-a-Rama. Uh, scratch that last reference. It’s already been done.
- I hold the door to be nice at the mall and the people entering ignore me as though I was Ralph the doorman on The Jeffersons and it was my turn to hold the thing opened for half of the visitor’s to Macy’s that day. Even Lerch got a thank you from Gomez Addams when he did the work.
Alas, like Styx said in the song Mr. Roboto…The problem’s plain to see. Too much technology. Machines to save our lives. Machines de-humanize.
Maybe when it comes to learning civility, we can all agree like we did back on Steven Hirschberger’s back yard. We’ll have a ‘do-over’.
I’m going out to ask the first person I see for the time.
And one more thing… Why do we talk about $2.49 per gallon gas like it’s the best deal ever?
Just thinking.
