They Did What !

Great column. Your "push the envelope" comment was right on. The lyrics of the "rapper" culture is one example. A car pulls up next to you at a stop light and the driver apparently feels that everybody in a radius of 200 feet wants to be captive to their mega-watt speakers pounding the beat accompanied by the most vulgar profanities. I'm tempted to get a megaphone to carry just for such situations so that I can suggest in volumes they can't avoid that I don't particularly want to listen to that garbage. Another example: Have you followed the Colorado University student editoral faux-pas with the fully spelled out word F*** Bush on the header? This 'in-your-face' attitude is becoming more prevalent and not less. I'm beginning to think the only way to stem this tide is to confront it when it happens. Like the recent story of the Veteran in Reno who cut down the Mexican flag flying atop the American flag. I'll bet that Reno will not see another Mexican flag over the "Stars and Stripes."
Until individuals in the general public gut up and confront this stuff it's going to continue.

Your idea of confronting things when they happen is a good one. However, it doesn’t seem to me that answering rudeness with rudeness is the best way to go. Perhaps it would be more effective to go to the source and respond with our wallets. For instance, not patronizing movies, not buying music, not watching TV shows that include profanity would hit the bottom line of the companies that produce these things. To be sure the point is made, this needs to be backed up with letters to these same companies explaining politely why we are no longer consumers of their products. To be effective, we need to each step up and do this and encourage others to do the same. In a free market, the best motivation for change is a declining bottom line.

Of course you're right. I agree with all of those suggestions you made, and practice each of them frequently. Still,"I'm tempted to..."
Glad to read your common sense blog.

I’d agree that society should not become molded after the lowest common denominators, and “being yourself” should not become an excuse for accepting less than the best one can do. Of course, people ARE always doing the best they can; no one tells themself in the morning, “I want to go out there and do worse than my best today.” I don’t believe “being yourself” was meant to mean don’t improve, but rather, find yourself, be free to express who you think you are, and not simply reflect the image others have of you. This requires first realizing one is not the person others have helped convince them they are, and also necessitates extricating themselves from the box created around the true self. Everyone knows this is not easy, can take a lifetime, be very painful, and often results in acting out at opposite extremes, before swinging back towards the middle. It’s called a process for a reason, often consisting of trial and error, and not always comfortable for self or anyone else. People need to be allowed the latitude to question, search, stretch and find themselves. And yes, as you indicated, there are those so afraid of this process and the need to grow that they avoid it at all costs, usually remaining in denial so as not to even be aware of it.

It’s not easy making large transitions in a culture, or as an individual. Sometimes I long for the good ole days, when Harriet and Nelson, and Father Knows Best seemed to represent our best values. It was easier to fill a known niche than to follow the instinct to change. But, as in the movie, “Pleasantville,” that was black and white, and had yet to be filled in with color; that is the hard part. Women were still making less money than they were entitled to and limited to certain career options (a situation not entirely rectified even now), civil rights were not considered unalienable by everyone, other lifestyles of all kinds were drastically more unacceptable than they are today, and so on and so forth.

Balance might be the key. It used to be that personal expression was stifled in many ways. There was the proper way to do this, and the proper way to do that, depending on the point of view of this or that group or person. In many situations, a woman was automatically expected to act one way, while a man could act altogether differently. Most definitely free speech or expression was not encouraged in monarchies and otherwise not so free places. And, I always considered Emily Post quite mad, or perhaps just personally frustrated in some way.

Cussing is a mixed bag. I think there are some that cuss too often and those that don’t cuss enough. Swear words reflect the intensity of feeling and emotion that someone is sometimes experiencing about a thing. It can be therapy just to speak a mind that is merely reflecting the strength of a feeling. Cuss words weren’t created in order to be outrageous, but to accurately express an emotion, and release tension. I can’t imagine blowing off steam by saying “Dang It!” after hitting my thumb with a hammer, and “gosh darnit” doesn’t come close to expressing the effect of certain situations. Yet, a person constantly using every opportunity to swear like a drunken sailor can be quite tiresome and offensive when not in the proper venue, like a bar filled with drinking sailors. Again, balance as in common sense, should be the key.

And though I agree Trish that idealistically answering rudeness with rudeness isn't the best way to go, sometimes it's the only thing that gets some people's attention. Look at some recent elections that were lost because one side bashed the opposition while the other side tried to take the high road. I guess until we are all enlightened "right behavior" will be a catch 22.

Mr. Hoeppner, I am an advocate of speaking one’s mind, and oftentimes telling others what I think. I don’t avoid confrontation at all cost, nor do I seek it in every opportunity. Personally, there are times when I will favor the truth over the risk of hurting someone’s feelings, and vice versa. One of the reasons why so many don’t trust any one, is because they know people so often do not speak their minds, or tell the truth. Imagine a world in which people did tell start telling the truth. At first, there would be the hurt feelings, the bruised egos, and all the outrage of others disagreeing to view the world from each other’s prisms. I think, however, that once this initial phase passed, most would be very glad to know that although they might not always like someone’s opinion, they at least know they can trust that person to be truthful about it. This of course gives us permission to do the same. In the end, I’d rather know the truth so I have choices. If I look fat in a certain outfit, I’d prefer someone to tell me so when asked. It might clue be in that I need to lose some weight, not simply hide behind clothes.

In the matter of the oblivious driver with the music and bass in his car turned up to the max for everyone to experience whether they want to or not, I do get some degree of satisfaction from the probability that at some later date that person will most likely lose some hearing. I know, not kind, but as you alluded to, it’s tempting to desire justice, especially when it’s so poetic! And, the sound of the person’s gun when it goes off in my direction might even be louder than the music and my complaining about it. Just joking (hopefully)!!!

Though “being yourself” was not meant to imply that improvement was unnecessary, it has been interpreted that way by some. Just as “be good to yourself” was mistakenly taken as license to be selfish rather than its true meaning of doing things that make you feel good about yourself. And selfishness doesn’t have that effect.
You are right that most people do not start a day with the idea of doing worse than their best. However, as people go through each day, over and over they must make choices, large and small, about what they will do. In each of these choices is the element of deciding how they will do it - stretch and grow better, put forth no particular effort and just stay the same, or let it slide and become less than before. These myriad daily choices not only determine who you are, but who you will become. Whether we admit it or not, we are making choices. Even refusing to choose is a choice.
Being a woman and having fought some battles for equal treatment and equal pay, I do not believe the “good old days” were good in all ways. What I do believe those days had that today’s world lacks is a kind of innocence that included great expectations and trust. The seamier side of life was not advertised as though it was just another lifestyle choice. Seduction of the young to drugs, pornography, stealing and cheating was not passed off as entertainment. Movies and TV did not present these things to impressionable young people as the normal behavior of grownups. Children were allowed to be children until they were actually old enough to start maturing into young adults. Today’s children start dressing and acting like teens long before they reach teenage. They are given the privileges of adulthood, before they understand the responsibilities that are a necessary part of those privileges. That produces a society of people who grow older without maturing.
There is a difference between repression and self control. Many, in their quest for personal expression, seem to have blurred the line between the two. The idea of respect for others as an influence in how we behave seems to have gotten lost. Swearing is one of the places this is especially obvious. And I am not talking about the use of expletives when you hit your thumb with a hammer. I am talking about the number of people who can’t seem to get through a sentence with out using the F word. If you listen to what they are saying, the word adds nothing, not intensity or any other feeling, to what they are saying. It is just habit and it is offensive to a lot of people. If they feel the need to talk that way, common sense and common courtesy would dictate they do so with friends who speak in like manner and not in public places or the presence of people who do not use this language. And especially not in the presence of children who mimic everything they hear.
You are right; balance is the key in this as it is in almost everything. No matter how good a thing is, taken to the extreme it becomes a problem. The pendulum swing of change is observable throughout history. However, there are times the pendulum doesn’t make it back to middle. The difficulty when that happens is that the eventual backlash carries the pendulum all the way back to the other end meaning all the progress is lost and the process has to start over. I hate when that happens!

I pretty much agree with most everything you have so eloquently stated. We can't afford to ever underestimate the power of denial in individuals and in collective society as a whole.

There is indeed a sort of sickness presently pervading our culture. I've felt it for quite awhile. And it is certainly not "liberalism" as those lost on the right love to claim. It's not an ideology, philosophy, or party platform. I'd say it has more to do with insecurity fueled by fear, and compounded by a false sense of reality, and manifested in many of the ways you stated. There is little trust and even less "real" faith (religion is not real faith) in the world, and it festers. It's like a pandemic loss of self, and a desperate and frenetic attempt to fill the void with chronic distraction, regardless of the ultimate cost.

I hope that makes sense. It is what it is.

As for enough people not rising to the challenge of doing something about it all, I just came across this quote tonight from a favorite author, John Conolly: "It has always seemed to me that there are two types of people in this world: those rendered impotent by the sheer weight of evil it contains, and who refuse to act because they see no point, and those who choose their battles and fight them to the end, as they understand that to do nothing is infinity worse than to do something and fail."