The Lemon Life | online magazine offering a fresh perspective on post-grad life.

Words by: Adam Weinmann

Image by: Crystal Bretschger Johansson

Rude people are everywhere. My uncle, who lives in Switzerland, told me this true story, observed by a friend of his at the grocery store check-out. At the front of the line was an older, gentle-looking man. Behind him was a mother and her  young child, and behind them, a bold-looking younger gentleman. The small boy in the middle of the line began to push his mother’s shopping cart back and forth, bumping the older man in front. His mother told him half-heartedly to stop, but this spoiled little monkey just pushed the cart harder, bumping the older man in front with more force. Finally, the younger gentleman at the end of the line said to the mother, “Why don’t you make your son stop?”
“Oh,” answered the mother, “He is being raised in an anti-authoritarian household.”
“I see,” said the young man. He paused a second, and then reached forward into the mother’s shopping cart, grabbed a jar of honey, unscrewed the top, and poured the contents onto the rotten little child’s head.
“What are you doing?” screamed the mother.
To this, the young man shrugged, “I too was raised in an anti-authoritarian household!”
Mothers are rude, children are rude, old folks and young men and women are rude. Rude People are popping up all over this sweet world of ours, forcing us to devise unique and courageous ways to deal with them in the most emotionally healthy way we can.

As a newbie cyclist in the fast-paced city of Toronto,  I have acutely experienced the dark side of human nature. In three months of cycling through city traffic, I have been flipped off, honked at and left to choke on car exhaust more times than my sensitive soul can handle.  And now that the weather has forced me to give up on the bike in favour of public transit, I find myself getting flipped off, shouted at and pushed aside with the same frequency.

So perhaps people are rude in transit. Put Mother Theresa behind the wheel of a Ford Explorer full of snotty, screaming children, barreling through downtown traffic at rush-hour, and I’d bet my bottom dollar even she would lose her cool.  But when I looked around Toronto, to see if this typically conservative city of mild-mannered Canadians might be breeding Rude People in all its cracks and crevices, I found that, sure enough, Rude Folk have infiltrated every corner of this fair metropolis. Rude Folk are everywhere…the nasty secretary at the physiotherapist’s office, the fat business man arguing with a Starbucks server…the list goes on.  And, as it gets colder, the Rude Folk, like an army of cockroaches, will work their way into your home. They’ll leave their stink on you. Christmas, the holiday of good will toward all men, has become the season of shoving aside one’s competitors to secure the last cable knit sweater on sale at H&M. Rudeness, like the Swine Flu, is catching.

Dictionary.com gives a number of definitions of the word ‘rude.’ My favourite: “Rough in manners or behavior; unmannerly; uncouth.”  So rudeness is a problem with manners, then. And what are manners?

The world has changed since the era when good manners were a sacred life code, a complex world of elbows off the tables, doors held kindly ajar for ladies and intestinal gas suppressed to an extent that my Jewish mother would consider dangerous.  We need a new definition for manners, a new code that takes into account the changes in social climate that have defined our modern world.  Here’s what I propose: manners, in this day and age, might just be about simple, common decency.

For now, I’ve decided on my course of action. When someone pushes me around on the subway, when someone’s child plows a shopping cart into me at the grocery store, or when someone treats me with a general lack of manners, I am going to smile back and continue on my way. Because this ain’t no anti-authoritarian world. As strongly as I believe in the importance of decency between human beings, I believe in karma. Give me the finger in traffic, and don’t be surprised if a persistent case of hemorrhoids descends in a fiery halo upon your life. Neglect to give your seat to the old lady on the bus, and you can expect your mother-in-law to stay extra long this Christmas season.  Budge in the line at Dunkin Donuts and, well…you get the picture. Simply put, manners matter.

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