It’s not just politics, honestly. It’s everything. To a certain extent, the things people decry as “political correctness” were known in my youth as “manners.” I hear the HR departments use “GRAPES” now – guns, religion, abortion, politics, economics, sex – but they’re just catching up to life in the 1970s in Alabama. Things like sex, money, religion were not topics of polite conversation. No matter what we might say in private or think to ourselves, slagging off someone because of how they talk or where they’re from or what they believe is just not nice. Pointing out and making a big deal of that one kid in the class who’s a Jehovah’s Witness and doesn’t do the pledge of allegiance would be rude and you could get sent to stand in the corner for it. I find it staggering that small-town Alabama in 1979 had a better grip on that than we do now.
But that’s only part of it. God knows I have gone on at length about the incredibly shitty behavior of people who ride their bikes on train platforms from Palo Alto and Mountain View, but the more I think about it, it’s not that these cyclists in Palo Alto are assholes, it’s just a byproduct of the fact that everyone is an asshole. Because we’ve normalized the absence of empathy, we’ve made it so that you don’t have to acknowledge that other people exist. And there’s a complete and utter mis-appropriation of things that were used to try to make some progress. Yes, there were people who broke the rules and sat in the front of the bus. But guess what – Rosa Parks knew damn well what she was doing, and got arrested, and went to jail. Civil disobedience works because you accept the consequences of breaking the rules and in the process show up how bad the rule is. Yet somehow we got from that to “well this rule is dumb so I will break it and should suffer no consequences for doing it,” as if being made to dismount your motorized one-wheel electric doucheboard is the equivalent of being made to use the colored water fountain.
There are things we have to do to get along as a society of large numbers of people. Let other folks off the elevator, or the bus, or the light rail before you get into it. Don’t talk at the top of your lungs, on speaker, in a crowded commute train. Occasionally look up and be aware of your surroundings going from place to place. Know whether someone was there before you at the Baskin-Robbins counter. And then there are things we do to try to make this a more pleasant life – say thank-you to the bus driver when you disembark. Tip on every drink so the bartender doesn’t get caught short at the shift change. Hold the door if someone is right behind you, not because of some archaic idea about “must hold the door for the lady” but because it’s the polite thing to do for whoever happens to be drafting you.
But the wrong sort of folks – elitists, bigots, racist pricks – used manners and etiquette as a club to go after certain people. And when society misused norms and manners, our solution was not to correct the misuse – it was to just ditch the norms and manners instead. Personally, this is another one I lay at the feet of the Baby Boomers, for whom “fuck your rules, man!” was apparently meant to be some sort of revolutionary philosophy. But the Me Generation’s radical individualism instead got us things like Reaganomics and the end of noblesse oblige and the contemporary doctrine of everyone from the GOP to Silly Con Valley to the pensioners of the entire western world: I got mine, fuck you.
I wonder how much longer I’ll be able to use Caltrain to commute. I don’t think it’s going to be very long.