Sitting at the Montgomery/Market Starbucks at a cold 7 a.m., I asked the technie at an adjacent table if he was using the extra chairs. He was alone, intimate with his laptop while sipping on his coffee. Without looking up at me, he curtly replied, “Yes, I am using it.”
No worries. The four of us managed to sit down, two to a chair. The guy at the adjacent table was alone with laptop and two empty chairs, no doubt enjoying the power he had over the coffee shop. Somewhere in the break in conversation with our friends, I imagined that young man’s parents, who must be so proud of rearing such an interesting, sociable young man.
Over the course of my trip back to my hometown, I began to run into – sometimes literally – other men and women who were lacking in common manners. They were rushing past older folks to get tables or ramming into strangers while punching furiously into their cellphone screens. In the evenings, they would clutter the MUNI bus, dressing like members of a WHAM tribute band, drinking beer on the bus while letting their thick boots kick the foot of a poor woman in a cast.
Then I got it. It is impossible to complain about their lack of manners when such niceties of life were never taught to them by their enterprising parents. Instead, I just have to get used to these new American manners, as sponsored by Amazon and made popular by a group of young, tech hip people who put organic, biodegradable underwear into their online shopping carts. They hold our future with their Google stocks and their foodie photos, and their future is as clear and concise as the endless self-portraits that appear on Instagram.
Putting friends, stores and interaction online may have robbed this generation of the need to integrate with people. Without turning off the computer, one could fall in love, get catfished, scammed, spammed, hit with multiple strains of viruses, practice racism, evangelize and bully. Why in the good old days, one would have to step outside and walk a few feet past a real tree to experience such niceties of life.
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