The British government recently announced that a large sum of money will be available to secondary schools to teach children better manners.
There isn't anything surprising in that, the world over, cultures bemoan the collapse of civilized behavior, remembering some previous era during which people were more gracious, the young respected the old, and life was a constant symphony of elegance and politeness.
So what's changed?
That depends on where you stand in the pecking order. Older people say there's been a breakdown in respect. Women say they're still treated like second class citizens in terms of money and power but like equals in terms of insults and dirty jobs. Ethnic minorities say they are abused; majority cultures say minorities abuse the rights given to them. I believe the truth is much simpler.
What's changed is time, and what brought the fact home to me was a conversation with my teenage son. I was explaining to him how, when we lived in rural France, buying bread from the van that called three times a week could take half an hour. First, we had to listen to all the local gossip and contribute our own insights. Then there was the receipt of various items sent to us by neighbors earlier on the route and the donation of things for those later on the route: old magazines making the rounds in the English language community, invitations to dinner, the occasional official letter for me to translate or recipe request for my mother to fulfill, and finally a quick tour of our vegetable plot so the van driver could tell us how our crops compared to those of our neighbors . . .
"Yeah right," my son interrupted. "When have you ever had that much time to waste? If it took half an hour to buy bread, you'd just buy enough to fill up the freezer and use the time you'd saved to work harder."
Mea culpa. At some point between my French idyll and my rosy recollections of it, I'd turned into the kind of woman who'd buy a freezer-full of bread to save a few minutes and, in so doing, would break a chain of communication that had been sustained for centuries by nothing more than the good manners of giving time to others.
This is why money to improve manners in school is the right step. I can remember when I was a schoolgirl, the louder you shouted and the more you waved your arm, the more likely it was that you were chosen to answer a question. One was essentially being rewarded for being quick and noisy. Out in the world of work too, it didn't take long to discover that a smart answer, delivered deadpan, passed for wit, and so taking the rise out of your colleagues or making asides on potentially embarrassing situations might not have made you popular, but it did get you noticed. To be noticed in the workplace is essential, right? So sarcasm was good, if you were good at it, and jumping to answer the boss' question before he finished asking it showed keenness, right?
And yet we all hate pushy, loud-mouthed yahoos who shove to the front of each line, shout their demands in the faces of clerks and service staff, and bellow insults if their orders aren't followed fast enough. Nobody appreciates a colleague who finishes our sentence for us, or the shop assistant who turns his back on us and starts piling our goods on the counter before we've completed our request. Those actions make us feel diminished, as though we don't deserve the respect of someone else's full attention, as though, in fact, they are showing off, parading their efficiency in response to our slowness.
So what can we do about it?
We can't change the pace of life, at least not yet. Speed seems to equal efficiency in many aspects of the modern world. While efficiency may not meet all our needs and certainly doesn't tend to encourage courtesy, it does at least feed our insatiable desire to "save time." But what are we saving it for? If we're simply using it to work harder, everybody loses. We should stockpile the time we save, like pennies in a jar, to use for things that matter—things such as conversing with friends, visiting elderly relatives, writing letters to distant loved ones, walking in the park with a child, and smiling at the people who pass us on the way. Then perhaps we'll start to remember why good manners existed—to allow us to enjoy life, at a slower pace.
BIO: As well as writing for the UK's premier sustainability journal, Green Futures, Pushcart nominated KAY SEXTON is Fiction and Creative Non Fiction editor at Her Circle e-zine. Kay blogs about writing fiction at writingneuroses.blogspot.com and has a regular column at Moondance.org. Contact her at kay@charybdis.freeserve.co.uk