What ever happened to kindness and courtesy?

The farther we as a country move away from God, the more evil it gets.

And it’s even predicted in the Bible. “In the last days the love of many will grow cold.” These are the last days. We’re seeing it get more so every day.

Socrates was complaining about the same thing several thousand years ago.

“The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.”

Greed and self centeredness is the new God. :-(

I am not convinced that people are worse today than any other time in the past. From what I can tell, things get better every day.

I suspect that a perception that things are getting worse has much to do with who and where you are. If I were an African American and were asked about the loss of the civility of years past, I don’t think it would make any sense. How civil and great were people to each other when they wouldn’t let people use certain water fountains or eat at a restaurant, etc just because of the color of their skin? How civil were we when we refused to recognize love and relationships between same-sex couples, and we treated them as diseased?

@snowberry I love you. You know I do. But it’s been my experience that the absolute rudest people claim be be devout Christians. Hands down. They seem to think they can say anything they want because they, and they alone, are under God’s shining grace and they speak for him.

@keobooks I thought the same thing.

I used to read a story like this: one teacher showed his students a paper with a spot of ink on it, then asked: “What do you see?”. All the students said they saw a paper with a spot of ink. The teacher then used the paper and wrote something on it and showed his students, saying: “I can still write on the paper. Because having this spot of ink doesn’t mean the paper can’t offer any space to write anymore. And as you can see, there is still a lot of space to write.”

The human brain is wired for the negative, so we tend to focus more on the negative than the positive. As @keobooks said, even people from long long ago complained that the world was getting to bad to live. The negative things can be few in number, but because we focus on them too much we think that they are too many.

It’s amazing how much kindness and courtesy one sees when we ourselves exercise these qualities.

As far as news commentators and chefs on reality TV, I figure that’s not the real world, that’s people being sensational for the cameras.

Yes, but apparently enough people are tuning in to the drivel for the shows to remain on the air, @jca.

Along with those we seem hell bent to breed common sense out of the human race as well, as the me first,me first disease takes more hold on man kind.

If they put nice people in the news and on tv the ratings would go down. People aren’t more assholeish… but the assholes get the attention. Nothing to do with who anyone worships or doesn’t. It’s all about ratings and commercial media. Anything else is naive.

I live in a very atheist country and we don’t have TV like America does. It’s ratings. Plain and simple.

It seems like television reflects our values over the years. Actually I’m not sure if television reflects our values or it teaches us our values. Either way the shows tend to parallel society in general. You can track our progress or deterioration from the early days 60 years ago to current. Leave it to beaver may not have been a real reflection of the typical family but it was a reflection of what we wanted. Married with Children is what we got. Joe Friday in Dragnet is what we expected, Dirty Harry is what we got. The Nelson’s reflected our music, now it’s the Osbournes. Is it progress to go from ‘Queen for a Day’ to ‘Naked and Afraid’?

I think there has been a progressive dismissal of the templates that have regulated social behavior for centuries. That has had upsides and downsides.

Decades ago, the counterculture movements encouraged wholesale questioning of authority and convention. This was a massive cultural shift. Much good came of it because there was a lot of nasty convention and abusive authority that needed to go. However, what followed was a general rejection of convention and authority altogether.

The problem is that much of convention and authority has to do not with oppression, but with social harmony and cooperation. The little niceties of human interaction are part of the package of social conventions that we absorb, and it is most often through the conduit of authority that they are communicated and enforced.

The ethos that has stepped into the vacuum of authority and convention is one of self-authority. While that has a strong appeal, it’s not a good recipe for social harmony. We now tend to not really know how to interact because there are few universally accepted templates. One result is that we just tend to avoid interaction altogether by retreating into self-serve isolation. It’s a kind of societal autism.

It was lost in the “ME” surge.

@kritiper. That reminds me of the old joke about the 50’s being the “Beat” decade, the 60’s the “Now” decade, and the 70’s the “Me” decade. People then referred to the 80’s as the “Beat Me Now” decade.

@Jaxk I don’t think today’s police resemble Dirty Harry so much as Copland. Harry was brutal but effective. Today’s cops are often reckless and power mad.

I’m a kind, friendly and helpful type, I think we get what we give. I recently had a rage roader guy that yelled at me totally back off when I told him I was new to the area and was going slow because I didn’t know where the frack I was going. He apologized and owned that he was having a bad day. I just laughed and said “I guess so” and he then kept apologizing as he pulled away from me.

Staying clam and meeting assholes with calm reaction diffuses a lot of pissy situations.
I smile at people, chat them up, make silly comments and observations while out in stores, public places and I have really positive interactions with others 99% of the time.

That’s true about ratings going down. But the problem is with the sheeples….they see that behavior broadcast 24/7 and think they should act like that too.

@Dutchess_III No, I don’t think the media we see has that much effect on our behavior. I really don’t. If that were the case, Norwegians would have have learned to look up and smile after watching decades of American TV.

They don’t sell too good.

Still puzzling out what you said, @cazzie!...?

I see lots of disparaging remarks made on Fluther about my country. Let me tell you one of the things that make my country great. We make mistakes.
We make mistakes, then we air them publicly, and we work to resolve them. We are clumsy, stupid and distracted. Ooooo, shiny! What? Right. We are loud, and out in the open. We speak our minds. Stuff looks ugly to viewers, but stuff gets worked through, and sometimes resolved.
So, what was the question again? Oh, right. I dunno.

@Here2_4, Yes – I agree. It doesn’t help when the media, both foreign and domestic, pick the most egregious material from all sides of the political spectrum. Whether for ratings, or other agenda, it makes the US and its people look dumb. They’re not. Well reasoned opinions do not make for good sound bites. The open discussion and willingness to change is somewhat unique to the US (and other young countries like Australia and Canada). Perhaps this is a good effect of not having too much tradition to get mired down in.

Things are as they always have been.

You don’t think it has been getting noticeably worse in say the last 10 years or so, @Darth_Algar ?

Common sense/truth went out when we opted for politically correct.

I think that might have been the start of it @si3tech .

Here’s how strangers acted kindly today, in my part of the world:

1. Held the train for me
2. Handed me the purse I dropped
3. Smiled at my puppy approaching rather bouncily, instead of complaining
4. Picked up the five € bill I lost, and carried it 100 metres to give it back
5. Let me cut in line at the grocery store
6. Warned me that my ticket was about to expire
7. Gave me advice on mowing my lawn
8. Asked about my old dog’s state of health
9. Helped me make up my mind about birthday parties (that’s online strangers, but still!)

That’s just today, in the five hours I was out and about – and I’m not even very outgoing. I just compared stranger’s kindness toward me to my own acts of kindness today, and I could only think of two. I owe the world.

If you make an effort to look for kindness, it’s there.

@Coloma

“Staying clam and meeting assholes….”

That’s also a good way of dealing with shellfish people! ;-)

@SQUEEKY2

No, I do not. The world you perceive around you is no more or less than a reflection of your mindset. Go around looking for/expecting negatives and you’ll find them at every turn.

When you assume everyone is a self-centered whiney baby, the surprises of kindness and civility come often.

This is beginning to sound like Sheriff John

I found it! I fount it! And it was in a place I never would have expected!

Hopes up!!!
Hopes dashed. A link to nowhere. Oh me.

What bugs me is when people my own age, who were raised with pretty strict ideas of what manners are, seem to have lost it all totally, within the last 10 years.

As an example, which I’ve brought up before, a friend I went to HS with went on a rant on fb, starting out with, “Last I heard pedestrians have the right of way, right?” And then went on this rant about some lady who had almost hit her in a parking lot. Well, shit, friend! As an experienced driver you know that drivers have a ton of things to be looking at all the time, and to have a dumbshit walk out in front of you without warning….
What happened to waiting until the driver stopped for you and waved you on, which 99% of them do?

This actually goes back to @si3tech‘s comment. We are so worried about being PC (even to our own detriment) that many have lost common sense. I’m in the right! So there!

The term “PC/politically correct” really needs to die a swift death. It’s become nothing more than a buzzword thrown around so often that it is now absolutely devoid of any meaning whatsoever (if it ever had any real meaning to begin with)

Now that @Darth_Algar I totally agree with.

“Politically Correct is the what people came up with because to be absolutely real is the bruise some people’s very thin skin.

Yeah, we don’t have that problem on fluther. Thin skinned folks don’t last long.

I second that motion @Darth_Algar

@Dutchess_III Yep, ya better have enough self esteem and emotional resolve if you’re gonna play in this sandbox. lol People that get their wittle feewings hurt easily aren’t gonna last long.