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.
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.
Edit to add:
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.
You have this amazing ability to give incredibly clear and concise words to these disjointed, nebulous feelings of unease I often experience from being out in the world these days.
You say exactly what I'm feeling, what I'm experiencing, with such precision so often. And I love you for it. There. I said it and I don't care who knows it.
Thank you. Thank you for being a human out there. Someone who truly understands and is unafraid to say it for the world to hear. I feel your passion and I feel your pain. I've read comments on your posts where people think you're being possibly over the top. I know you're not. See, I don't just *live* in Brooklyn, I'm 50 and I'm actually *from* here. This tells you 2 things: I come from a time when this place was difficult and produced tough people, who took no shit, who could see it coming from a mile away. It also tells you I'm in the deepest, bluest of the blue, wokest, most ridiculous places in the country... just like you. Your observations are 100% correct.
People who want to argue that you're just talking about "very online stuff" couldn't be more wrong. If you live in a deep blue area, this has bled into every personal interaction you have *in real life*.
Since I left the bubble, my neighbors don't talk to me anymore. Any time I've tried to have a calm, rational conversation with another adult here, it's gotten really ugly.
From the time I expressed to one devout Branch Covidian neighbor that I had no intention of taking the shots that were still being developed at the time, unless they could prove they were safe (oh, look at that, turns out they weren't... who could've seen that coming?) to a recent exchange I had with a fellow parent from my daughter's play group that got so bizarre, it left me shaken for days. The subject? Can you guess??? This grown-ass, middle-aged white WOMAN, a mother of 2 children, "birthing person and chest-feeder", was sitting on a park bench, pontificating about a friend of hers who has an 8 year-old child (natal male) whom she socially transitioned as a 6 year old, who didn't feel safe at one play group because... wait for it... the facilitators didn't want her to read a book about trans kids at story time to their children. They didn't kick her out, they didn't ask her to take her Transhausen-by-Proxy crazy self or poor, confused child out of the group. No, they simply told her "no, we don't think that's appropriate for the group." Apparently "no" is not allowed. She sat there clutching her proverbial pearls at how transphobic this group was, how unjust it was that her brave, virtuous friend had been so maligned, smugly telling me that we live in the most transphobic, homophobic, racist country in the world. She even relayed a story about (I kid you not) her gay brother being a transphobe himself because he won't comply with the trans narrative, bigot that he is! (The horror!) Then this WOMAN finishes with her coup de grace...the spiel, you know the one, about how "gender is a spectrum, puberty blockers are magic because they just pause puberty, etc..." we've all heard it, they all read from the same script. She was so pleased with herself that she didn't notice I wasn't nodding in agreement.
Thing is... even a year or two ago, I might have believed the same things, fallen for the same bullshit, but I woke the f*ck up. And I made the mistake of telling her so.
I quietly and respectfully told her that sex is a binary, not a spectrum. How you present in the world has nothing to do with your biological sex. Puberty blockers are medical malpractice and harmful to young children. And I told her that her brother is correct and that maybe she should listen to the lived experience of a "G" in the LGB+++ alphabet soup they've tacked onto the rainbow flag. Maybe someone *from* the so-called "community" has some valuable insight that she, a privileged, white, straight, "cis" hetero-normative woman in Park Slope, Brooklyn might benefit from hearing. You can imagine how the rest of this conversation went. We didn't yell, we didn't argue. I saw the look come over her face when she realized I wasn't buying what she was selling. You'd think I just shit my pants from the look of horror on her face. She immediately jumped up, made an excuse about being late for an appointment, collected her daughter, and literally ran out of the park.
She stopped texting me for play dates, even though our daughters adore each other and they're too young to care about any of this bullshit. My husband was very exasperated with me because he's much better at shutting his mouth, even though he agrees with me. He was raised in a Jehovah's Witness family, so he knows how to keep his trap shut for fear of repercussions.
So yes, Mr. Slocum, you are not imagining that these real-world interactions are changing you. Making you more distrustful, making you second-guess every exchange. Thank you for observing these things, reflecting on them, and trying to come out a better person for it, despite the nonsense you see around you.
Now you know why I love you and why I'm honored to have your presence in my life and I'm not afraid to say how much I need to hear your voice and appreciate that I'm not alone out here! Thank you!