The Death of Civility - What Being American Used to Mean

Why would I lead off a post titled The Death of Civility with pictures of legendary University of Alabama football coach Paul "Bear" Bryant?  Yes, I'm from Alabama but I'm not a rabid Crimson Tide fan.  I chose this picture because it perfectly illustrates the point I will be making here.

In the photo to the left you see The Bear in his typical houndstooth fedora.  He was one of the old school coat and tie coaches.  Never in a ballcap or anything casual when he was on the sideline.  And the signature headgear was always in place with one exception.

When Alabama squared off against Penn State in the 1979 Sugar Bowl in the Super Dome the head was bare (no pun intended).  When asked why the hat was missing Coach Bryant replied that his mother had told him to always take off his hat when indoors.

Super quaint right?  Well actually it was just considered common decency once upon a time.  There were always situations where men were expected to remove their hats.  It was seen as disrespectful to wear your hat during the playing of the National Anthem, going inside anywhere, and certainly never at the dinner table.

Of course it may just be me going through the standard routine of getting old.  You see more and you learn more.  Things you did when you were younger seem like a distant memory.  Even though kids are acting a lot like you were at their age you no longer have a tolerance for it.  But there are differences.  I'm pretty sure it's not just me.

I was raised in a wealthy family.  We were members of an elite country club and Mobile Mardi Gras related clubs.  There were ample opportunities to assume proper attire and put my lessons in manners and etiquette into practice.  But my mother's side of the family was not wealthy.  They were decidedly blue color, working class folk.  In the late 60s and early 70s, however, the same manners applied to everybody regardless of class or background.  Maybe it was because so many more American adults at that time had gone through some sort of military service.

But I even remember back then, I think it was in Scholastic magazine, there was a recurring strip featuring characters named Goofus and Gallant.  Goofus was a jerk and nobody liked him because he had no manners, was insulting, self-indulgent, etc.  Gallant was the kid everybody wanted to hang out with.  He was mannerly, courteous, kind.  Well you get the idea.  But the point is that it was meant to be a simple course of instruction on good, civil behavior.

Somewhere along the way in the past few decades these lessons have been lost.  Parents aren't going out of their way to teach this stuff to kids anymore.  I was barraged with it.  If it wasn't from my grandparents it was from magazines like Scholastic or in school or from Sesame Street.  In other words I was getting it from society in general.

Maybe it was when the 70s was dubbed the "Me Generation".  Maybe it was all the guys coming back from Vietnam with questions about why they had gone.  Maybe it was the feeling following Watergate that you couldn't trust anybody any more.  Maybe, and I think this is the greatest cause, it was the Reagan years when so much emphasis was placed on the American ideal of rugged individualism.  It was certainly in place when Hillary Clinton came out with her "it takes a village" message in the 90s and was widely ridiculed by the conservatives.

But when I was a kid it was a village.  All of my life lessons were coming from a wide variety of sources.  I really took it all to heart.  It meant a lot to me to be mannerly and to know how to behave in public.  We as a society were better for it.  Back then it seemed like being an American meant being part of something larger than yourself.  Of course John Kennedy expressed it best when he said "ask not what your country can do for you".  Really the same sentiment as it takes a village.  We were like one big monolithic thing.  Civic duty meant something.  Being polite and courteous meant something.

I won't say that liberals are any shining example of civics in action.  But the Republican party these days represents solidly that idea of self and the individual.  The pull yourself up by your own bootstraps American of the wild West.  And the antagonist is the "you didn't build it yourself" progressives like Elizabeth Warren.

I can identify with Elizabeth Warren.  To me she is a crusader for the little man.  She seems above politics.  Something like a modern Teddy Roosevelt.  She seems like someone who came from that same background of civic personality as I did.

That attitude of self above all that permeates conservative ideology is exemplified around me all the time.  The same people who love Alabama football and Bear Bryant can be seen in any restaurant wearing their ballcaps at the dinner table.  They don't like to use their turn signals in traffic because they know they're turning why the hell do you need to know?  They don't turn on their headlights at dusk because they can see where they're going.   There's no thought that one turns on his headlights at dusk so other drivers can see him.  They don't feel the need to give a lady their seat on the train.  There's just no sense of being a member of a community.  There's no sense that, as an American, you have some civic duty to help other more unfortunate Americans.  Slash food stamps, slash education, slash art spending, slash everything so they can keep more of what's theirs.

Really nobody seems to give a crap anymore.  You go to WalMart and people are walking around in their pajamas.  Where I live people literally wear flip flops year round and drag their feet while they walk.  Boys are wearing their pants halfway down their asses.  Little girls are working to make as much of their cleavage as possible and wearing clothes no self-respecting hooker would wear.  And their parents don't care.  The parents are so busy living their own lives that they choose to let their kids raise themselves.  Just bring them into the world and throw them in the back seat of the SUV with the DVD player while Mommy is on the phone making weekend plans.

I think my grandfathers and grandmothers and even my parents to some extent knew that they had a responsibility in raising a child.  Not just to feed and clothe and educate the child but to send out into the world a responsible citizen.  Back when that term citizen had some literal meaning.  As an American citizen you were expected to have a sense of what being a citizen meant.  Being part of something bigger than yourself.

It still means something to me.  I behave in public as if nothing has changed.  One of these days when I have a child I will do my best to raise them with the same sense of citizenship I have.

Groups like the NRA have even turned something like the 2nd Amendment into an individual rights issue.  In the time of the writing of the Bill of Rights things like city police forces were rare or nonexistent.  The first part of the text of the amendment is "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state".  It was written with a sense of communal responsibility.  In its current interpretation it's mean to imply that each person should be allowed to have any type of gun they want.  There is no longer a sense of having a weapon to insure the safety of your city or government.

People and corporations will go to outrageous lengths to not pay taxes.  They have no sense that taxes are meant to make our country strong.  That they can give us a feeling of cultural community with museums and parks, police and firefighters, streets and bridges and sidewalks.  All the things that make a community a community.  There is only the concern for keeping as much of what is yours to yourself.

NRA Banquet with Ballcaps.

Of course the conservatives have the opposite idea of what the problems in our society are.  It's the moochers who feed off the work of the bootstrappers.  It's the gays and women's groups and their agendas of inclusion and acceptance.  But I assure you I would rather be around an army of polite gay men than with some teabagger NRA member wearing his ballcap at my dinner table.  The idea of "no one is going to tell me what to do" and "I'm a grown man so I'm going to do what I want when I want".  Those are the attitudes that destroy a society.

But that's the liberal side of the message.  I feel the same way about immigrants, legal or not, who come to the U.S.  If I moved to France I would learn the language, embrace the culture, have the same pride in community that I was raised with here.  So, yea, I think there are things like common language that enhance the strength of a nation.  You can still have ethnic pride.  Hell, I got married in a kilt but I'm not going to ask a government worker to give me a driver's license test in Gaelic.  There is room for individuality but for a country to stay strong there should always be the knowledge that you are part of something greater and that there are times when the self is not as important as what the self is part of.