By Jae-Ha Kim
Chicago Sun-Times
February 8, 2001
Imagine finding strangers sitting on your lawn chairs, drinking beer and scarfing down sandwiches on your deck.
You’d ask them to leave, right?
Now imagine them telling you where to go.
“Rude goes way beyond slamming a door in someone’s face or flipping them off on the highway,” says 48-year-old Wrigleyville resident Mike Porcaro, whose property has often been besieged by rowdy Cubs fans. “I had to chain my barbecue pit on the deck because people felt compelled to open the lid to look inside, as if they were going to find the Holy Grail or a mini-Sammy Sosa.
“The rudest act was when the drunks would urinate on my deck,” Porcaro says. “This was a regular occurrence after night games. When I reprimanded the culprits, I would usually get a response like, ‘Well, if you’re stupid enough to live by the ballpark, you should expect this.’ ”
Gone are the days when everybody knew the rules. Flipping the bird was a huge deal. You didn’t swear in front of women and children, and women certainly weren’t expected to cuss. When a neighbor screamed for help, you went to his or her aid, or called the police. These days, with more people living in concentrated areas, rudeness appears to be the norm rather than the exception.
“A lot of people are talking about this growing rudeness,” says Bernard Beck, a Northwestern University sociology professor. “There’s rudeness, and then there’s rudeness. One is when people really cause harm, while the other is a breach of etiquette. Some people think it’s rude when people don’t get dressed up to go to the opera. Then there’s road rage, which is a very different kind of rudeness.”
What constitutes politeness these days is unclear, Beck says. If you offer a seat to a 60-year-old man, will he be insulted that you view him as old? It’s the same with women. Will they perceive men as being condescending for holding doors open or letting them depart elevators first?
“Some people don’t think they’re being rude; they’re just not sure what they’re supposed to do,” Beck says. “What we used to consider old in the old days isn’t old now. Or rather, we’re not sure it’s old. So we can’t automatically jump to the conclusion that people who look a certain age are infirm. Also, everybody understands that the role of women has been renegotiated. So some men’s attitude is that if women are going to live in the ‘real world,’ then let them stand on a bus like everyone else.
“This isn’t segregated to just women or the elderly. There used to be certain types of people where there was automatic deference — police, judges, clergymen, lawyers. That’s certainly not the case anymore.”
You’d think giving up a seat to a pregnant woman would always been in vogue. Not necessarily, says former Texan, Lara Stott, who got a big, ol’ nasty taste of big-city mores when she was pregnant.
While standing on a lurching bus, Stott was taken aback when a teen girl not only neglected to offer her seat, but also shot her a dirty look that screamed: “Do you mind?”
“I can’t imagine anyone from home being so rude,” says Stott, 30, a Chicago account supervisor. “I don’t expect a lot, but I think if a woman is visibly pregnant — and I was almost nine months pregnant — or if a person is elderly or physically handicapped, someone should offer them a seat.
“Another time there was a woman who obviously needed to sit down. All these people were pretending not to see her because they didn’t want to stand. Finally, I got up and offered her my seat. When this man saw a pregnant woman offering another passenger comfort, he said, ‘Please, take my seat.’ But I honestly don’t believe he would’ve offered if I hadn’t gotten up first. He was shamed into it.”
The problem, says rudeness expert Jeff London, is that poor conduct inside the workplace has infected everything.
“There’s a growing pressure to get things done more quickly and efficiently, and people don’t have as much down time anymore,” says London, an attorney at Sachnoff and Weaver in Chicago, where he advises companies how to root out rudeness. “[Employees are] reachable by fax and cell phone and pagers. Their bosses call them up at home on their days off. They’re unable to escape their jobs.”
London even admits to being rude — without realizing it, of course.
“I used to hover over a colleague’s desk until she was off the phone,” London says. “Or I would just sit down and wait ’til she was done. Now, I ask how long she’ll be and return when she’s off the phone. Unless I’m part of that conversation, I have no reason to be there.”
Rude behavior has infiltrated everyday society in other ways. Profanity is an accepted part of our dialogue in the workplace, as well as on primetime TV. A soap opera ad shows a vixen with the word “bitch” underneath her image. And in a commercial for A&W root beer, one of the characters repeatedly mispronounces Mr. Dumas to sound like the rear end of a donkey.
“I can’t find a teenager anywhere who thinks that ‘pissed off’ is a bad phrase,” says Jim O’Connor, author of Cuss Control: The Complete Book on How To Curb Your Cursing. “The ‘f’ word and the ‘sh’ word account for about 70 percent of all the swearing we hear. They’re clearly swear words, but so were ‘bitch’ and ‘damn’ at one point. But these words are perceived as particularly rude or foul these days.”
Adds Beck, “This country is more heterogenous than ever before. And for all the benefits of living in a cosmopolitan place, there are downsides, too. You have a lot of people from different cultures who aren’t like you, which is a plus and a minus for some people.
“City dwellers have learned to mind their own business on elevators and public transportation because they’re squeezed into spaces where you ordinarily wouldn’t choose to be that close,Ó Beck says. “So you avert the eyes and you don’t speak to the people you’re riding on the elevator with. And to someone from a smaller community, that’s going to come across as cold and rude.”
Leigh Ann Hirschman thought she had seen it all when she lived in New York. Then she took a cab in Chicago. When the 32-year-old writer handed the driver a $20 bill — the smallest denomination she had — for a $4 ride, she was frightened by his reaction.
“He was furious,” Hirschman says. “He got out change for me and threw it at my face. I hadn’t even paid him yet, and I kind of pulled back in my seat from the shock of having something thrown at me. He lurched over to where I was and pulled the bill out of my hand. Maybe he thought I was rude for not having smaller change, but I thought he was crazy.
“I was really surprised at how rude this guy was. To this day, if I have to get something that doesn’t cost very much at the 7-Eleven, I’m very careful about apologizing first to the cashier if I don’t have a small bill. It’s very strange ’cause at one point, you just run out of small bills.”
*****
Rude Behavior
“I was waiting in line [at Ikea] to make a return. Everyone gets a number, and you wait until you’re called. For some reason, the clerk didn’t call a number. He just pointed to another guy who had come after me. That guy knew I was there before him, but instead of saying, ‘He was here first,’ he just went ahead. That was the same as cutting in line as far as I was concerned” — Tom Saunders, 57, Roselle
“I was driving home the other day and was waiting at a stoplight. The light had just turned green, and the guy behind me started honking. They can’t even wait for you to step on the gas pedal nowadays before they start honking.” — Lance Michaels, 42, Tinley Park
“I was running for an elevator, and I could see there was one guy already on it. I saw him reaching for a button, and I thought he was trying to hit the ‘open’ button for me. But as I got closer, I could see he was furiously hitting the ‘close’ button ’cause he didn’t want to share the elevator with me. I thought that was really rude.” — Sara Liang, 26, Chicago
