Whence the badditude?

I've seen a few stories lately in several of the multiple media outlets I follow, bemoaning the lack of courtesy and civility in America today. If it ain't grownups spitting on other grownups, hurling racial epithets, or screaming in each other's faces until the spittle flies, it's children sassing the grownups, refusing to behave or comport themselves appropriately in public, clearly out of their inept parents' control.

Unless we're in law enforcement and the behavior is breaking a law, we don't have control over these people, their behaviors, or how they run their lives. All we can do is try to control our own comportment and that of our children. I'm a firm believer in not allowing my children to disrupt the peace of others in public. If they do, there are consequences, appropriate to the time, place, and age of my child. And my children know it.

They also know that I'm kind of a rules girl. I tend to think that many rules exist for the safety of others, for establishing equality, for ensuring the prevalence of the rule of law, for keeping people from killing each other, willfully or accidentally, for maintaining the peace. I tend to follow the rules because of my awareness of their importance. I don't skirt them for my own convenience or think, "well, that doesn't really apply to me because...(insert rationale here)." I follow them. Not blindly, but rationally and in the spirit in which most rules are intended. And my children know that, too.

As I sit there, being a rules girl, I've noticed the tremendous frequency with which the people around me do not follow the rules. Perhaps it's because we're a Honda family in a neighborhood of Lexi, Mercedes, and the Biggest Goddamned SUVs Amerka Can Make. Perhaps we're just the bourgeoisie implanted here like lowly weeds among all the beautiful, expensive hothouse flowers. Regardless of what underlies these differences, I've noticed a few things about the adult behavior around me. Many adults in my corner of the world seem to think that rules are for sissies, for wimps, for losers. And that's just the women.

They cut the car line at school. Not for special reasons, but every single day. You see, some of us just shouldn't have to wait in lines--we're just Too Important For That. They let their Humvee-dwarfing automobiles idle outside the daycare center for half hours at a time, directly funneling exhaust into the walkway leading to all of the classrooms. They talk on the phone in the car line, which happens to be against the law around here. They roll stop signs to cut people off, go 45 in a 30 in our neighborhood, and mercilessly tailgate anyone who has the temerity to go the speed limit. They're pushy, they're self entitled, they're obviously above the rules. And that's just their driving. Usually with children in the car. You should see them in the grocery store.

And as I watch this happen, daily, frequently, the same perpetrators over and over and over again, I think to myself, I'm not the only one who knows they're doing this. I'm not the only one who knows they're breaking the rules. Their children know it, too.

That's just my corner of the world. But I tell you what, as we say in Texas. I don't have to go far to figure out where the incivility and the bad attitudes come from--or where they're going.