Every morning as I drive my children to school we come to a three-way stop, a T-junction at a point where two lanes of incoming commuters have to pause and wait their turn. Most days, the traffic stops and starts with perfect harmony. If you’re in the third car to arrive at the junction, you wait until the first two cars have gone before taking your turn, according to custom.
Each time I get through the stop without incident, I feel grateful that our culture retains this nicety. To me, it’s an enduring miracle of civilization that strangers will politely take their turn when, frankly, it would be easy enough at this particular junction just to jump ahead of anyone slower with the gas pedal.
Of course, bad apples come rolling along too — aggressive drivers who take advantage of the first little gap in the stream of traffic to jump the queue. Each time someone does it, whether or not he’s punished with a blaring horn, he degrades things for the rest of us. Cutting a line does more than get you where you’re going faster; it also weakens the hold of the rules on everyone else.
By rules, I obviously don’t mean traffic regulations but the unwritten expectations of decent conduct and fair play that make it possible for vast numbers of people to encounter one another with courtesy and without violence.
Maybe it is the precariousness of the times that makes these invisible conventions seem especially precious. There is no guarantee that they will persist. Widely shared rules of politeness can vaporize with astonishing speed.
In this regard, it’s instructive to reflect on the dramatic alteration in public behavior wrought by the advent of the cell phone.
Not long ago, I witnessed a remarkable episode outside a Starbucks that illustrates the point. Two women were sitting at a metal table some distance from the cafe, chatting over cups of coffee. Several more tables stood between them and the street — all empty. On to the scene walked a man talking loudly on his phone.
Perhaps the sight of the cafe arrested him; at any rate, he paused a few feet from the seated women. Facing them, but with his eyes directed into the middle distance, he yakked at high volume. He was getting lousy service from his Internet provider, he said. He couldn’t get through to customer service, the jerks.
The two women fell silent. It was probably impossible for them to continue their conversation; they seemed to be waiting for him to finish. He talked on, blah blah blah, utterly oblivious of his surroundings and then paused, listening to the person on the other end of the phone.
Perhaps the man didn’t like what he heard, perhaps he was half-preparing to sit down, or perhaps he just had an itch, but at that point he hooked his foot around the leg of a nearby chair and yanked it. Clang! went the metal, a few feet from the amazed women.
The man didn’t sit down. Still listening, seemingly unaware of the rude disruption he’d caused, he kicked the chair back into position Clang! and wandered away, still talking.
It wasn’t a big drama — no bigger than when someone cuts line — but you have to wonder: Once a basic rule of courtesy disappears, will it ever come back?
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
