The title is a riff on one of my favorite W. B. Yeats poems, A Prayer for My Daughter. Yeats had high hopes his daughter would learn the lesson. I’m not so sure about today’s Americans. Take this New Year’s Day story from the NYT: A Nation on Hold Wants to Speak With a Manager:
It is a strange, uncertain moment, especially with Omicron tearing through the country. Things feel broken. The pandemic seems like a Möbius strip of bad news. Companies keep postponing back-to-the-office dates. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention keeps changing its rules. Political discord has calcified into political hatred. And when people have to meet each other in transactional settings — in stores, on airplanes, over the phone on customer-service calls — they are, in the words of Ms. Luna, “devolving into children.”
Anna Luna is a store employee who had been confronted by a customer who said he had been cooped up for months because of the pandemic and wanted some carambola Cambozola, his favorite cheese. But the store didn’t have any, and he lost it.
“Have you seen a man in his 60s have a full temper tantrum because we don’t have the expensive imported cheese he wants?” said the employee, Anna Luna, who described the mood at the store, in Minnesota, as “angry, confused and fearful.”
As the article says:
It’s not just your imagination; behavior really is worse. In a study of 1,000 American adults during the pandemic, 48 percent of adults and 55 percent of workers said that in November 2020, they had expected that civility in America would improve after the election.
By August, the expectations of improvement had fallen to 30 percent overall and 37 percent among workers. Overall, only 39 percent of the respondents said they believed that America’s tone was civil. The study also found that people who didn’t have to work with customers were happier than those who did.
We’ve long been a people who think we can — and should — have what we want when we want it, NOW. Americans as a whole are not noted for patience. That’s one reason, by the way — or not at all by the way — that we are at a disadvantage competing against the Russians and especially the Chinese, who have a long history of patient planning. Our idea of long-range planning is the next quarter; more often, it’s to the end of the week. If that.
So part of our anger stems from impatience. We are, understandably, sick and tired of the pandemic, and we lash out at whomever is closest to hand, even if — sometimes especially if — they are powerless to do anything about our discomfort.
But that can be cured. If, in the beginning of the crisis, the Great Orange Shitgibbon™ had urged all Americans to work together, to pull together, to make a few sacrifices (like masking in public), we could all get through this crisis together and be a stronger nation for it. If Trump had done any of that, he would have been reelected in a landslide. But Trump wouldn’t recognize civility if it walked up to him and slapped him in the face. He is a bully (and, like most bullies, a coward) who takes sadistic pleasure in watching people fight each other. Now, of course, we have an exceptional civil person as president, but now it’s too late. Trump has set the tone.
The GOP, hesitant and even horrified at first, went along with him, for two reasons. First is that they are all afraid of him. Second is that anger in America serves their political purposes; divide and conquer. It’s gotten so bad that ordinary courtesy is now seen as weakness, as unmasculine, as a symptom of “political correctness” and “woke” culture. Congressional representatives get censured for failure to give common courtesy, and they wear that censure as a badge of honor and use it to promote their reelection. The Republican leader of the House, whose job it is to keep things civil, says that if he becomes Speaker, the first thing he’d like to do with the gavel is hit Nancy Pelosi on the head with it. And other Republicans think it’s funny.
It’s not funny. A democracy runs on courtesy, on giving the other side in a political debate the courtesy of considering their needs, their arguments. But of course Republicans these days have no arguments they defend in a courteous manner. So, like a lawyer who has neither the facts nor the law on their side, the GOP pounds the table.
Can this incivility be cured? I’m not really optimistic, because Republicans have made their recent gains precisely by acting like spoiled brats, in imitation of the Orange One, who has behaved like a spoiled brat — and gotten away with it — all his life. What we need is an intervention. Biden and the Democrats (and the few remaining civil Republicans) are the only ones who can do it. Will they?
(PS: I don't like to post and run, but I will be out for a couple of hours. I’ll check in then. Happy New Year!)