With the midterms coming up, there’s plenty to complain about, mostly stupid people saying stupid things, doing stupid things, and generally being stupid about politics. But one of the problems with society is that stupid people are being stupid about a lot of things beyond mere politics, and we need to complain about those too. This isn’t just old guys shouting at clouds. This is a little deeper, a little more basic. Sure, the big things matter. But it’s the little things that impact our lives every day, and when a critical mass of annoying little things builds up, you get an explosion of awfulness. We’re living in one.
Now, some of it is the fault of foreigners, people coming here who don’t know how to behave like Americans should, and we’re solving that problem by sending a lot of them home. For the ones who stay, we can solve more of it by refusing to endorse or tolerate their nonconformity. It’s not too much to expect that if a stranger comes to our country, even legally, he behave in accordance with our cultural norms. You know, stuff like not being annoying in public and not molesting either our women or livestock.
But it’s not just foreigners. I wish it were. Sadly, our own people are doing many of the things that make this country so annoying. It’s Americans who seem to have forgotten the basic cultural norms that make for a high-trust society, a society where we’re not constantly dealing with little problems and can focus on things like putting men on the moon. Our society shouldn’t be chaotic. Our society shouldn’t be tolerant of low standards, whether in behavior, products, or anything else.
Things like people who don’t understand that headphones exist. When you’re having a phone conversation, you should probably not do it in public if you can avoid it. If you can’t avoid it, put the phone against your ear or use headphones, and do it quietly instead of blasting it on speaker so your inane conversation can dominate the public space. This is especially true in a small public area, like a bus or a waiting room. Nobody wants to hear your phone call. Nobody wants to hear your YouTube video. Put your headphones on. That’s what they’re for. My favorite part is when you tell people, “Hey, you need to stop playing your videos loud,” and they look at you like you’re the idiot. You’re not the idiot. They are the idiot. And an idiot should hear that he’s an idiot. That will make for fewer idiots.
And you should think about what you’re doing when you’re living your life. You shouldn’t wander through public interactions half-asleep and turn them into a sloppy mess. My favorite example is halfwits boarding an aircraft. It’s not hard. You get on with a reasonable bag instead of a steamer trunk, make your way to your seat, put the bag overhead, and sit down. This is not the time to be guzzling a cup of coffee. It’s not the time to be having a phone conversation, even with headphones. It’s a couple of minutes when you should focus on doing one task quickly and efficiently. When you sit down, that’s the time to sip your half-caf, half-latte venti Americano. Then you can quietly make your phone call, with the phone pressed against your ear or through headphones, voice low, so we don’t have to hear your stupid conversation. And it’s always a stupid conversation. People having smart, interesting conversations don’t have them out loud.
Is it just me, or are people becoming worse drivers? I come from the land of the greatest drivers on Earth. Los Angeles drivers are absolutely the best. They will let you in, they understand how to move in traffic, and they tend to use turn signals, unless they’re foreigners who consider the flashing lights the manifestation of one of their many bizarre local gods. I like Texans. They are the nicest people on Earth in person, but you put them behind the wheel and they become outright demonic. They’re not as bad as drivers in Boston, but they’re bad. For some reason, people in giant pickup trucks feel exempt from the whole turn-signal thing. They also take it personally when you want to change lanes, as if it’s a game of dominance they must win by blocking you from the lane you need for your exit. Perhaps they see my use of a turn signal as a sign of weakness, chum in the water for freeway sharks in a feeding frenzy of bad driving.
Big business is screwing up too. We need to rage against corporate societal encrapification (there’s a non-FCC compliant term for it, but I’ll go with this). Products and services are constantly becoming crappier. Stuff that once worked doesn’t work anymore. Remember that avocado-green refrigerator your mom had in the kitchen back in the ’70s? It’s still running in a garage somewhere, cooling some guy’s Budweisers. How long do you think the one you just bought is going to last? After the sixth or seventh failure of the high-tech washing machine we inherited in California, we went out and bought what we thought was just a normal washing machine. That was about three years ago. Today, it’s rusted. What the heck?
And here’s another mutation of something great into something mediocre that bothers me: smashburgers. Hear me out. At one time, this was an interesting modification of the classic bun-meat-cheese-lettuce-pickles-onions-tomato-ketchup-mayo construct. I thought they were okay as a novelty. Now that’s all there are. Everybody’s got a smashburger, and they are all boring and bad. Why is this encrapification? Because the idea behind a smashburger is that any doofus in an apron can prepare it. All he’s got to do is press down really hard and cook the thing until it’s a tasteless hockey puck covered with too much salt. All smashburgers are the same, and they’re all bad. America’s unofficial national food has gone from something juicy into an overcooked saucer of third-tier meat. You don’t have to use good beef if you’re going to cook it beyond well done. Cut the quality but jack up the price – it’s like private equity invaded our kitchens.
Oh, and then there’s the current tipping insanity, but I’ve already made my position on that clear. It’s yet another annoying degradation of the status quo.
So what do these random gripes have in common, besides being the ravings of an aspiring curmudgeon? They show that we’re tolerating things getting worse. It’s not a political thing, and it’s not a legal thing. Well, the bad driving is a legal thing, but you get the point. These are cultural things. These are things we accept that we don’t have to accept. We, as a people, can refuse to do them ourselves and refuse to tolerate them from others. You can choose not to be a jerk in public. You can choose not to be unable to perform basic functions like getting onto an airplane or driving right. You can refuse to consume overcooked garbage or buy crappy products. You can choose to tip reasonably. It’s not going to make you popular. People will try to shame you. People will tell you you’re cramping their style. You might end up in a fistfight. But should we allow our society to be dominated by the dumbest, most annoying 10 percent, whether that’s of people or of businesses?
No. The society most of us grew up in wasn’t perfect, but back then we didn’t put up with this kind of nonsense. So talk on the phone like a normal person, use your brain when getting on a plane, drive better, refuse to pay for junk, and tip properly. Alone, these things aren’t going to make America great again. But it’s a start.
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