Other people's bad manners

From politics to music and sports, Americans are jumping up and down and screaming for the chance to look really, really bad in the spotlight.

It really came to my notice with the town meetings about health care. I believe in democracy, I believe in the right to speak your mind -- but I also believe in common civility and taking turns.

Then there was Joe Wilson, calling the president a liar, Serena using language even I -- notorious for a sailor mouth -- don't use, and, of course, Kanye.

I think it's time our public figures went back to kindergarten. That's where their mentality seems to be anyway, and I think they could learn something about public deportment from the See Jane Run set.

Buzz is 10, and he gets to spend a couple of days a week reading to kindergarten students and just loves it.

"They sit real quiet and listen," he said. "They raise their hand when they want to say something."

Having worked with kindergarten children for many years, I can also tell you this -- kindergarten students take turns. They share. They are quiet when they are supposed to be and answer questions when they are asked.

They have a profound sense of justice and recognize injustice immediately.

Of course, there are moments when they break the rules and speak or act out -- but they're 5 years old. I think we can cut the 5-year-olds a little bit of slack.

The 45-year-olds, on the other hand ...

Buzz is not a stellar student. He makes the As and Bs honor roll, never all As. He doesn't have perfect attendance and unless he's in the water, he's not much of an athlete. On awards day, he'll come home with a few stickers or certificates recognizing his artistic abilities or his As and Bs, but the award that always makes me the proudest is the Good Citizen Award. The school gives it out to children who have shown good manners and thoughtfulness. It acknowledges good behavior and helpfulness. In my opinion, it tells me more about how my son is doing at school than his report card. All the As in the world don't mean anything to me if I find out my son has been a bully, a cheat, or just plain rude.

Isn't it sad that being good is no longer its own reward? It seems we reward bad behavior with media coverage and even fan bases. When Brad cheats on his wife, it makes the front page, but when Hugh brings bagels and coffee to the 700 people who waited in line all night for his movie premiere, the only place it gets mentioned is in blogs and tweets.

I'm working on a story about fashion faux pas, which is really, really funny if you ever saw my wardrobe, but as I went down the myths and no-nos of clothing, I noticed a pattern. The rule about not wearing white after Labor Day comes from a time when white clothes tended to be made from linen or cotton -- not good cold-weather clothing. It makes sense not to wear lightweight clothes when the weather gets chilly, now doesn't it? That same factor explains why it is "socially unacceptable" to wear sandals after Labor Day.

The reason Emily Post and Company say a man should always precede a woman down the stairs is so that he, usually being larger and stronger, can catch her if she trips on her long skirts and falls. The reason a man usually walks on the outside of a woman as they go down the sidewalk comes from the days of muddy streets and slop jars. If a carriage passed by and threw up a curtain of mud, or someone tossed out their chamber pot's nightly offerings from an overhead window, the man was more likely to get spattered than the woman.

The pattern that I noticed was that the rules, even when they seemed silly, have sound reasoning being them somewhere. True, many of the reasons that prompted these rules are now obsolete, but many aren't.

In the movie "Blast from the Past," Brendan Fraser plays a young man reared in a bomb shelter by his stuck-in-the-fifties-forever parents. He emerges into the modern day world with his Eisenhower ethos intact, and when he is ridiculed for being polite and considerate, he says, "Good manners are just a way of showing other people that we have respect for them."

I'm trying to raise those Eisenhower kids, but it's not easy when I'm having to compete with cartoons that make jokes about passing gas, commercials in prime time that would have been considered soft porn when I was their age, and everything and anything on the internet.

When Ben, 17, came in to tell me what Kanye West had done at the awards show, he was disgusted.

"What a tool," he said.

I was proud that my son recognized bad manners -- and horrified by his vocabulary.

Then again, as the writer H. Jackson Brown once wrote, "Good manners sometimes means simply putting up with other people's bad manners."

-- Mary Reeves is a staff writer for the Times-Gazette. She can be reached at mreeves@t-g.com.