Be Nice, or Else

Is courtesy common? No, no it’s not.

We’re on a road trip that culminates in dinner at that famous place in Missouri that hires people to throw bread at you. If you’ve ever been there you know there are always hundreds of people waiting to eat some good food and get hit in the head by yeast rolls. We sign up and get number 954. They call number 7, so we have a few minutes to wait. The 14,000 people ahead of us are milling around the 9 seats in the lobby. I notice that the median age of the seated patrons is 22. The median age of the dining hopefuls that are standing is 63.7, give or take a decade.

Notice the seated patrons are young. The standing patrons are not young. Exactly 3 of the older unseated hungry are on oxygen. Several are on canes. Some are using walkers.

I stand near a seated young man wearing athletic shoes and 18 inch biceps. When he looks up from his copy of “Young and Rude Monthly” I point to a one legged octogenarian balancing on a single arthritic foot. He looks, then looks back at me, and resumes reading.If not for the bulging biceps and an aversion to being jailed in a strange land, I would have smacked him in the back of the head. He obviously needed it. More importantly, his parents should be smacked for not smacking him when he was rude. The lack of parental attention to manners must be an epidemic, because no one else offers a seat to anyone.

Later on we stop at a Wallyworld in the Missouri Badlands. My wife whips out her newly endowed handicapped placard. I motor up to the head of the parking rows, but there are no empty spaces for handicapped. Most of the cars parked in handicapped spots don’t have any documentation that allows them to park there. There is even a motorcycle parked there. I grumble and park miles away. Near the end of my 5 mile hike to the door I see a couple of largish young men in their truck talking to other Neanderthals while parked in the handicapped space. I’m pretty steamed so I approach the linebackers and educate them on the law and common courtesy. They find me funny. I fail to see the humor. This situation is exactly why I don’t carry a high pressure fire hose when I go out.

I’m not advocating smacking young adults in the back of the head. That’s very wrong. I’m not advocating lecturing large males about parking etiquette. I’m advocating an age old educational technique. I’m advocating willow switches to the lower body. I’ll have to get back to you on whether or not it’s legal, so don’t start using them yet.

Let’s look at the situations again. Look at waiting for a table. The young couple is sitting while an elderly couple stands. The elderly man shuffles over and says,” Get up. We need your seats.” If they don’t comply quickly, Grandma brings out the switch and smacks them on the shins. What’re they going to do? They probably wouldn’t dare hit a senior citizen. They’ll probably just get up and grumble like a scolded child. On the outside chance they bring the police in, educate him as well. When arrested, the judge may need educated, though it may be harder to smack him in the legs when he’s behind that big bench. When you go to jail for being an educator of the young, you may not have access to a switch, so come up with another educational tool.

Maybe verbal scolding is the best course of action because they’re just ignorant. My Grandma educated me. I wouldn’t dare sit in the presence of a lady. I also would never wear by cap at the table, or put my elbows on the table, or curse in public. While those are other issues, they point to the root cause of bad manners. That root cause is a lack of correcting bad manners at appropriate times.

With the possibility of the authorities frowning on the whole switch thing, just try a little passive-aggressive action. When driving on the interstate, drive real slow in the left lane. Go down the parking lane at the store the wrong way and make everyone back up to let you through. Block the aisle in your favorite retail establishment. Make the young walk around you. Move your electric scooter back and forth erratically so the young people have to dance around. Wait, we do that now. It hasn’t worked.

I know what to do. If the young won’t get up, sit on them. If they use up the handicapped spots, sit on the vehicle and refuse to get up when they return to it. It’s even better if you happen to be incontinent. That brings a new aspect to the term “sit in”. If we all do these things, the world will be a better place. The world will be a better place where a guy can sit down while waiting to get beaned by a hot roll.

by Charlie Melton