In the South when I grew up, kids learned young to mind their manners; not so much today. Young liberal feminists are rude and self-centered, interested in making a spectacle of themselves rather than displaying elegance and refinement, and young men don’t volunteer their seats for elderly people and pregnant women, meet other people’s eyes when being introduced, or even keep their language clean and polite until conversational ground rules have been established. (Then again, a lot of young women could stand learning the same things.)
These are not trivial things. No, bad manners never murdered anyone, but the clear social rules of etiquette are there to prevent accidental misunderstandings and teach self-control, both issues that, unaddressed, often lead to violence. (I strongly suspect that a new social norm based on better manners would lead to decreased crime.)
But we don’t have that today. Instead, we have young people who are so bad at understanding other people they believe they are surrounded by microaggressions and encoded language. Their misconceptions are reinforced by equally triggerable people around them, and their claiming of the victim mantle is lauded rather than mocked. Instead of an egalitarian etiquette providing balanced protection for both people in a social interaction, certain groups learn they must be retrained to think differently, to defer to certain other people based on color or sexual orientation, and under no circumstances (for guys) make any social move with a young woman until and unless she sets up the ground rules under which they must mutually operate.
In short, we have a diseased and broken society: unjust, unfair, and unkind to anyone not in the deferred-to groups. There are people who think it’s okay to hit other people with bats – just because they don’t like their ideas. That’s about as bad as it gets
The reasons are multiple, including too much practice with self-pitying social media and not enough practice with real people. But the main issue is that these people are not learning that basic innocuous-seeming skill: etiquette. Like the old adage “fake it til you make it,” learning etiquette as a child is practice for sympathy, empathy, and human kindness. It keeps social interactions peaceful until those involved can converse, then begin to understand one another.
Look around. How much etiquette do you see in your everyday life? How much respect are people giving to strangers in casual situations, where social etiquette is most important?
I blame one thing above all: poor mothering habits. It has always been the mother who corrects bad social habits – sit up, be quiet now, address him as “sir”, always open doors for ladies, give up your seat to those who need it more than you do, don’t run in public areas, put your phone down, smile and speak clearly. Schools do a little of this, but a single teacher of a large or even small class can’t possibly instill all this along with properly educating students.
It takes the one-on-one interaction with a mom who does not want to be embarrassed by her children to do this.
Why aren’t moms doing this?
For one thing, they aren’t treated with respect anymore as individuals. Instead, the creeping miasma of Marxism is turning women into cogs, not moms. Women today are invariably expected to work, preferably outside the home where they can visibly contribute to the industrial machine. Marxism and its descendants treat women like units of labor, RUR units, not individuals to be valued for their hard unpaid labor as well as paid labor. If you’re a housewife and stay-at-home mom, you don’t get respect – you are, instead, dismissed as stupid, lazy, or unambitious. But women who do work outside the home very often don’t have the time or energy to care for children in the way they once did – and the first thing to go is etiquette teaching and practice.
Because of this, another thing is happening – this generation of new moms is being encouraged to focus on themselves above everything. Since we females are “minorities” (though of course we are not) the world owes us the freedom to pursue true equality – which this brave new world of feminism tells us is to eschew our natural femininity to become more like men. We don’t have to be moms anymore, and we don’t have to worry about kids knowing social rules. Shortchanging the kids? They’ll be fine. They learn all that stuff at school, right?
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