Holding on to being human

chronicling cultural decline

His tone of voice should have alerted me that I was being addressed by a human, but I jumped back from the counter anyway.

”Can I help you with something sir?”

I wasn’t rude, but I was more terse than I wish I’d been.

”No, thank you. I’m just looking,” I said as I eyed the boxes of sandwiches and chicken nuggets.

His tone sounded a little more apologetic.

”OK! Well just let me know if you’d like me to make something fresh for you that’s not on the menu board.”

Now I was feeling even more sheepish. I tried to make my tone sound warmer than usual.

”Hey, I really appreciate that. Thank you, sir.”

Why did I initially react with anxiety bordering on snappishness to a man who was being nice to me? Aside from the ways I’m just broken upstairs, it’s because I’m not used to being treated like a human. Where I live, in the bluest of blue states, with the Kindest of Kind (TM) progressives, it’s the exception.

See, just before this nice 60-year-old white man tried to take my order, his early 20s black counterpart had “interacted” with me. And before you start typing that comment, I’m not “mentioning race.” I’m mentioning culture. This is not about skin color. It’s about cultural tribes in the US.

I walked up to the counter before this story above starts. With a smile, I said, “Good morning, how are you?” to the young man packaging up salads behind the counter. As is almost always the case today with young men, particularly young black American men, I got no answer. I got a quick glance from a stone face before he went back to his salads.

To such people, customers do not exist. And if they do, they, the customers, are doing harm to the employees. How? By their custom. By trying to make purchases, and by inquiring about products. The employees are trying to wait out the clock, and we customers have a lot of nerve passing coin over the counter to pay for those jobs.

Being ignored this way, treated rudely, is normal where I live now. It is not the exception.

And the behavior is not equally distributed. It tracks age, socioeconomic status, and culture. Remember how I mentioned the “race” of each participant above? Here’s why.

Young American blacks, in the part of the country where I live, are the most aggressive, rude, and entitled class of people by far. Everyone knows it. Including the middle class and rich white people who flagellate themselves every day marching from one Unitarian Church to the next Nonprofit Community Center bearing Black Lives Matter signs.

It’s truly obvious. If you come from a part of the country where this behavior does not happen, and you’re having a hard time believing me, even you would spend one day here and say, “I thought you were exaggerating, but I see that you are not.”

I italicized American blacks above, because this is not behavior intrinsic to people with dark skin. It’s specifically American black behavior. There is a counterpart among white people, and we have no trouble describing that population with the term “white trash.”

The black immigrants who live here are nothing like the American blacks. Not only are they just as courteous as any average person (used to be), they’re often even friendlier than one has a right to expect. It doesn’t matter if they’re from former French colonies in Africa, or from the Caribbean, or from anywhere else. As long as they’re not Americans, you’re likely to have a pleasant conversation with a lot of smiles and maybe a joke.

This behavior is not, of course, restricted to young American blacks (but it is, I am truly sorry, more prominent among them). Young people as a rule are now, at the very best, awkward and unskilled in basic human conversation in a business setting. But more often, they’re lazy and rude.

They communicate not just disinterest, but contempt. In their posture, their refusal to make eye contact, their immediate brushing off of any inquiry with “I don’t know I’m not the manager,” with their deliberate back-turning to customers so they can text behind the cash register.

This bothers me deeply, this cultural decline. As readers of this Substack and watchers-listeners to Disaffected know, it drives me to distraction. Sometimes to despair.

What bothered me this morning was noticing how I’ve been conditioned by rudeness, and I’m starting to give it back. Worse, I almost directed it at someone who was being genuinely nice to me.

I jumped back from the counter when the polite gentleman spoke to me because I’m not used to being spoken to at all by employees now. For a split second, I assumed he was going to tell me not to touch items, or to pay for them before I picked them up (this is one of those new customer-rings-himself-out convenience stores), or to otherwise lecture me because I didn’t understand the self check-out system.

It’s more common to be corrected like an annoying child when you’re spoken to by an employee today than it is to be offered help. I assumed I was going to be “corrected” because that is the more usual interaction. My response was regrettable, but it was rational. You, too, would change your basic assumptions if you were conditioned this way for years as anyone who lives in my area has been.

I’ll have to go back to this deli tomorrow and be extra-nice to the sandwich guy.

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Coda—For most of my life, other people have told me that I obsess over “little things.” Things that don’t matter. “Why are you so upset? That doesn’t mean anything.”

Because I’m aware of my own histrionic personality tendencies, I’ve tried to be self-aware about my reactions. Am I obsessing over little things that don’t matter? Is it all “in my head?”

Readers, I’ve decided that the answer is “no.” And I think I’ve let my awareness of my own failings turn into a new insecurity. I think I’ve listened to other people too much, and blamed my own neuroticism for too much.

I’m very imperfect, but I am not dim or unobservant. At 48 years old, I am not young, either. These decades of adulthood have taught me real things. I have observed real, objective behavior, and real, objective, predictable patterns of behavior.

These things are happening outside my head. They’re happening independent of my emotional disposition. They may “feel” differently to a more even-keeled person than they feel to me, but they are not fantasies that exist only in my head.

This is why I write about these “little”, “unconnected” things. They are neither little, nor are they unconnected. They are part of the unraveling of the cultural fabric, and they are weighty and serious. I am noticing real patterns that affect our lives, and someone needs to chronicle them.

We don’t experience history from the vantage point of the White House, or a capital building, most of us. Nearly all of us are just ordinary, work-a-day people who live and work and shop in a fixed location. We experience history on the small and domestic scale.

It matters. Someone needs to write it down.

And—thank you for noticing.