{"id":2344,"date":"2016-07-14T10:08:35","date_gmt":"2016-07-14T18:08:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/?p=2344"},"modified":"2016-07-14T10:08:35","modified_gmt":"2016-07-14T18:08:35","slug":"norm-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/?p=2344","title":{"rendered":"Norm, part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s not just politics, honestly. It\u2019s everything<\/em>. To a certain extent, the things people decry as \u201cpolitical correctness\u201d were known in my youth as \u201cmanners.\u201d I hear the HR departments use \u201cGRAPES\u201d now – guns, religion, abortion, politics, economics, sex – but they\u2019re just catching up to life in the 1970s in Alabama. Things like sex, money, religion were not topics of polite conversation.\u00a0No matter what we might say in private or think to ourselves, slagging off someone because of how they talk or where they\u2019re from or what they believe is just not nice.<\/em> Pointing out and making a big deal of that one kid in the class who\u2019s a Jehovah\u2019s Witness and doesn\u2019t do the pledge of allegiance would be rude<\/em> and you could get sent to stand in the corner for it. I find it staggering<\/em> that small-town Alabama in 1979 had a better grip on that than we do now.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s 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\u2019s not that these cyclists in Palo Alto are assholes, it\u2019s just a byproduct of the fact that\u00a0everyone<\/em>\u00a0is an asshole. Because we\u2019ve normalized the absence of empathy, we\u2019ve made it so that you don\u2019t have to acknowledge that other people exist. And there\u2019s a complete and utter mis-appropriation of things that were used to try to make some progress. Yes<\/em>, 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<\/em>. Civil disobedience works because you accept<\/em> the consequences of breaking the rules and in the process show up how bad the rule is. Yet somehow we got from that to \u201cwell this rule is dumb so I will break it and should suffer no consequences for doing it,\u201d as if being made to dismount your motorized one-wheel electric doucheboard is the equivalent of being made to use the colored water fountain.<\/p>\n

There are things we have<\/em> 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<\/em> you get into it. Don\u2019t 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\u2019t get caught short at the shift change. Hold the door if someone is right behind you, not because of some archaic idea about \u201cmust hold the door for the lady\u201d but because it\u2019s the polite thing to do for whoever happens to be drafting you.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cfuck your rules, man!\u201d was apparently meant to be some sort of revolutionary philosophy. But the Me Generation\u2019s radical individualism instead got us things like Reaganomics and the end of noblesse oblige<\/em> 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.<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n

I wonder how much longer I\u2019ll be able to use Caltrain to commute. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s going to be very long.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s not just politics, honestly. It\u2019s everything. To a certain extent, the things people decry as \u201cpolitical correctness\u201d were known in my youth as \u201cmanners.\u201d I hear the HR departments use \u201cGRAPES\u201d now – guns, religion, abortion, politics, economics, sex – but they\u2019re just catching up to life in the 1970s in Alabama. Things like … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Norm, part 2”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2344"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2344"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2344\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}