The Value of Courtesy

The decline in polite conduct, to greeting a stranger on the street for example, has been going out of fashion for several decades. There is no personal indebtedness for the impact of or on others.

People take care not to ruffle the feathers of their own stock or of those of their next door neighbor, but say what they please to a stranger purely because they may never have to see that offended person again. It is not considered an obligation, but as merely a surface tradition.

The movie The Age of Innocence makes a mockery of upper class polite society, and when people think of it they conjure up an image of a stuffy Victorian scenario. They fail to consider how better it would be if that rude so and so on the queue had of known manners, or how nice it would seem if a man was to open a door for them if they were a woman.

I recently read a question on Yahoo Answers where a man asked if it was acceptable that he farted in a womans face in a restaurant because she would not blow her cigarette smoke in the other direction while he was eating.

Clearly both parties were at fault in this disgusting incident. Not surprisingly, most of the answerers to his question said it was perfectly acceptable to fart in the womans face. In the old days, if you disliked someone, or had an issue with something about them, you were elusive. This was a solubility of approach that was just as busying to dissolve.

More than often one would rue over what was exchanged. You never said it to ones face, and therefor the other party would sit and try and figure out the conflict. People once thought about what they said or did. Society had a different complexity to this one which is but fast paced. Now all people do is knock each other down in the rush to the top.