Does anybody remember how to behave in public?

In 1982, a fire broke out in the apartment building next to ours in Orange County, California.

I was 8 years old and home alone after school, a latchkey kid. The smoke alarms went off. I recalled the training about what to do in a fire from our parents and the public service announcements that used to run on television. In this case, the right thing to do was to leave quickly and go up the street to my grandmother’s house.

Fellow adults, we have to be adults again. Even if the other grown-ups around us don’t like it, we of good will have to work to reinstill polite, considerate, and safe public behavior.

As I was walking to the front door, I grabbed my belt, tucked my Superman T-shirt into my jeans, and fastened the belt.

It was an automatic action. My brother and sister and I were not to leave the house with dirty faces, uncombed hair, or disheveled clothing. It didn’t cost me any time, as the belt was right there; I would have run faster if the flames had been licking my heels.

I remember the pride I felt when Grandma called my mother to tell her I was OK. “By God, he remembered to put his belt on before he left the house; he’s such a good boy,” she said.

The bare minimum

Going out in public neat and presentable was not something you thought about; it was just a way that you lived. Look around you now at the grocery store, at Applebee’s, on a downtown sidewalk. People from age 6 to 60 are walking around with snarled hair, fat rolls hanging down underneath too-small shirts, and dirty clothes. Your nose will tell you that the percentage of Americans who shower daily is substantially lower than it was 43 years ago.

We have a manners crisis. The crisis is that we have abandoned manners, rules, and common standards that make living in society bearable and, once in a while, pleasant.

At 50 years old, I find myself shocked to discover that I’m not considered a “grown-up” whom children or teenagers need to treat with minimal respect. Adults can no longer correct misbehaving children in public without risking getting punched by their enraged parents.

Kids in adult bodies

There are very few adults left. There are plenty of people in adult bodies, but so many except the most elderly of the old walk around like spoiled children, ignorant of everyone around them and devoid of even the smallest courtesy to fellow citizens. The adults won’t let you correct their kids because they themselves have never corrected them. The bad example grown people set — including a majority of modern parents — for the young has destroyed civilized behavior.

We are a nation of narcissists. “I’m gonna get mine no matter what it does to you” is our motto. It’s reflected in nearly every advertisement for the past 15 years. Think of the phrases you hear most often in pitches for products: “No boundaries,” “tear down barriers,” “nothing is more important than YOU.” Those are verbatim (and common) phrases from commercials that will be familiar to many.

Fellow adults, we have to be adults again. Even if the other grown-ups around us don’t like it, we of good will have to work to reinstill polite, considerate, and safe public behavior.

I do not have children of my own, but in middle age, I have paternal urges. I want my nieces and nephews to know how to act like ladies and gentlemen. I want the schoolkids in my town to respect themselves, their peers, and the adults who care for and educate them. Not “just because.” I want this because our etiquette-free Thunderdome has made the U.S. a pretty miserable place to be if you ever have to conduct business in public.

We are not happy people. You see it on the faces of the young and the old. It doesn’t have to be this way.

My friends from the South tell me that manners and civility are still very much alive where they live, and I’m glad to hear that. But having lived up North and in Democrat/blue areas most of my life, I can tell you that the slovenly rudeness is appalling. And worse, few if any adults seem to even notice it — except those of us who still practice mannerly ways while being called “old-fashioned” and mocked.

The wisdom of Miss Manners

Etiquette expert Judith Martin is known to older readers as Miss Manners. For decades she wrote a syndicated column on etiquette, combining practical advice with the kind of arch and hilarious prose you find only once in a generation. When I went off to a snooty, expensive liberal arts college in my early 20s, my older friend got me a copy of several of Martin’s books.

Being young and callow myself, I expected to hate them. Instead, I realized the lady knew what she was talking about. Everything she advised made sense and rang close to the lessons I remembered learning as a child but hadn’t fully understood.

Martin was at pains to correct misperceptions about etiquette. It is not mainly about when to use a fish fork at a swanky dinner party (with the fish course — duh); it’s not an affectation of the idle rich from a Victorian novel of manners.

Nay, etiquette is the domain of the shared and universal folkways and manners that make personal, social, and business life predictable and bearable. It sets out social rules and makes available social punishments for those who take advantage.

Most importantly, she noted that etiquette is not about “making everyone feel comfortable.” Here’s a bit of advice she gave to a reader who was tired of having people she met ask her about her baby’s due date since she wasn’t pregnant.

“People often tell Miss Manners that etiquette is just a matter of making other people feel comfortable,” Martin wrote. “Well, often, yes. But there are times to make people uncomfortable enough that they stop discomforting others. This is one of them.”

Rude awakening

We have all gotten too comfortable with being personally comfortable at the expense of others. If the 1970s were the “me” decade, then we are living in the age of self-love and self-care. Another name for that is narcissism. It is high time for the manners-minded among us to start making the rude majority uncomfortable enough that they stop stepping on our toes literally and figuratively.

Readers, I do not know exactly how we are to do this. It’s a project that needs collective buy-in; it’s a “tragedy of the commons” problem. We’re afraid to appropriately upbraid the sullen and unhelpful clerk because we know that her boss is likely to side with the 17-year-old with a face full of metal and green hair. We’re more likely to be fired as a customer than a snotty, incompetent teenager is likely to lose her job for being rude to patrons.

Some modest proposals

But we must find a way to do it anyway. As a start, here is a short list of mannerly and orderly behavior we all remember from not so long ago that should make a comeback.

• We walk on the right side of the sidewalks and store aisles. Not the left and never right up the middle. Civilized people do not stand in the middle of an aisle with a cart ignoring those trying to get past.
• We hold doors open for the person behind us. Walking through without even a glance backward while the door slams on the next patron is rude.
• Red lights mean “stop,” not “floor the accelerator through oncoming perpendicular traffic.”
• The left lane of a highway is for passing, not travel. Civilized people do not go 55 miles per hour in the left lane, matching speed with the other car in the right lane, preventing all other motorists from passing by creating a two-car barrier.
• Telephone calls are private, not public. Taking a call at all in public is rude. Holding your phone out like a platter with the speaker function on is actively hostile to everyone around you. Civilized people excuse themselves for important calls and take them around a corner. There was a reason telephone booths existed.
• No one should ever hear the beeping noises or, God forbid, the TikTok videos playing on your phone. Silence that infernal contraption or put in earbuds.
• Children should address adults as Mr., Mrs., Miss, or Ms., not as “Tyler” and “Caitlin.” A compromise would be the Southern way; children address adult friends of the family as “Mister Mike” and “Miss Kate.”
• Pedestrians may have the legal right of way, but being in the legal right does not annul the laws of physics. Civilized people do not slowly saunter into oncoming traffic, deliberately refusing to turn their heads to observe cars as if daring them to strike. One day, somebody will, and it won’t be the driver’s fault.
• When you place a call to someone, you, the caller, identify yourself first. Have you noticed this modern practice when you get a call? You answer the phone, and some person you’ve never heard of says, “Is this Josh?” Excuse me? Who are you?
• Decent people cover their bodies in public. The amount of skin on display, including excess cleavage and buttocks hanging out of “clothes,” is obscene. If your great-grandmother dead in 1960 could be brought back to life, you would forgive her for assuming the top occupation in 21st-century America is prostitution. The only person who can get away with wearing a gownless evening strap is Cher.

Maybe you’ll have some ideas to leave in the comments.