"Today we affirm a new commitment to live out our nation's promise through civility, courage, compassion, and character." Apparently when President Bush said this in his Inaugural Address last year not too many people were paying attention. In fact, a study conducted by the Pew Charitable Trusts shows that 79% of the Americans surveyed consider rudeness and lack of respect to be a serious problem in our nation (Harris 4). (Fig. 1) With very little effort, you can find a plethora of articles describing how the civility and etiquette of this nation has deteriorated to an almost non-existent point. A substantial amount of these articles charge incivility with intensifying a majority of the world's problems. It is not that civility has up and disappeared people have just replaced it with selfishness and severely enlarged egos directing others to follow suite, consequently initiating the snowball effect within social behavior. The abundance of incivility today has changed the way we function at work, the way we go to school; it has even endangered lives by affecting the way we act in our vehicles. .
Before getting into the many statistics and quotes about civility you need to know what it is. Simply put civility is an opinionated dictation of how everyone in society should act. Whether written or not there has always been an understood code of conduct, a certain way you are supposed to act. Theoretically, these ideas and actions would have been passed on through children by their parents; or at least you would think so. In the case where the parents had failed in doing this the school environment would take over as the medium for teaching manners and social etiquette. These methods no longer apply to the children of this generation. Parents no longer have as much time as they did in the past so they allow television and video games to instruct their children on how to live. Over the years, we have had to pair and tailor civility to keep society running smoothly while at the same time making it less of a priority in our lives.
