The Loss of Civility
Drive on any road and readers can witness how what was once called civility is gone. Speeding, cutting other drivers off, and swerving in and out of lanes are all part of this new ritual. Drive the speed limit and within minutes, if not sooner, someone will be hugging your bumper and sometimes aggressively. Road rage is another result of the hostility people feel in contemporary society and the willingness to inflict that hostility toward others. Road rage can end lethally.
The Internet is another place where civility is lost, a highway of information, where many feel free to express vicious hostility to strangers with whom they disagree. As a veterinarian once said to me when I discussed one such incident: “They’d never act out like that in the coffee shop down the street.” I’m not sure I agree with that sentiment. Many armed with the lack of civility and with guns do act out and where they act out is immaterial to them.
These behaviors were once mostly absent from a more civil society. But we are now an atomized society, a do your own thing society, and people are alienated from one another.
In the town where I live, provincialism means bullying to some. Here, where economic comfort has populated the area for decades, there are those who can be counted on in the far-right of the political spectrum to turn on those who they believe are either responsible for their socio-economic status, or are seen as a threat by way of education, income, or behavior. The outsiders are sometimes referred to as “New Yorkers” (who visit and own first or second homes here), a kind of antisemitic trope.
I have dealt with these kinds of characters most of my life and certainly since high school, that cauldron of peer pressure and insecurity. But here in Massachusetts, the so-called bluest of blue states, bullying is accepted as the norm by the government in the town where I live. Recall how the bullying of an adolescent caused her to commit suicide several years ago? That girl, Phoebe Prince, was tormented until she took her life. Phoebe Prince was a resident of western Massachusetts.
Bullying can cross the line to violence. I brought a person to court 10 years ago who punched me at a local gym because I asked him to stop an abusive behavior. The case that was heard before me involved an older woman who was harassed by a man with whom she had had a romantic relationship. The judge dismissed the case that involved the man driving up onto the sidewalk with his pickup truck as she walked. The judge found the woman hadn’t had enough instances of harassment to issue a restraining order against the man. My case was also dismissed with the admonition that the man who assaulted me and I needed to find a way of working out our differences at the gym. Even a casual observer can determine what is going on here in the bluest of the blue.
Right outside of my door I don’t have to wander far to find a combination of the lack of civility and outright bullying as I recounted in “Intolerance in the Berkshires of Massachusetts” (Howie’s Substack, April 29, 2024). Here, they, the bullies and haters don’t give up. Last week the same town official, mentioned in the article cited above, cutting grass on private property as a property manager, drove up and down the driveway creating massive plumes of noxious dust reminiscent of one the incidents I documented in 2015. The beat of harassment goes on and on and on. Since I cut my own grass, which borders the neighbor’s similarly constructed driveway, I know how damaging driving a mower over a gravel driveway can be. They, the bullies, will not stop their behavior and they’re protected by a right-wing local government.
The Loss of Civility