What does polite society mean today? Does it change by culture? Region? Town? What are, if they exist, the universal agreed upon acts of common decency?
Let’s throw out some of the more obvious acts against decency, the kind that might show up on stone tablets. Things like casually stabbing a neighbor while stealing his wife (whom you’ve been coveting for some time now) while screaming “I’m not stabbing you, I swear!” These acts are antithetical to the functioning of society on any level, but what about things that don’t dissolve the union and sew insurrection amongst our ranks? What about the really irritating things?
Being a home away from home and a melting pot of various peoples, the university setting is a perfect example. It’s a place of higher learning, cultural diversity and comes with fruit basket of things you never knew you hated so much. We’ll begin with the mind killer, labeled as pollution and technically a crime: noise. Everyone has different tolerances to noise, but the common causes are usually the same.
Here’s a familiar scene:
Little Johnny American has finally arrived at The University of Freedom in Justiceberg. Moving into his dorm or student apartment away from his parents, Johnny is finally on his own. Something strange happens to Johnny. All this freedom and anonymity reaches directly into Johnny’s brain and disables both his ability to reason and sympathize with other human beings. Suddenly there comes a knock, knock, knocking at Johnny’s door. It’s little Suzie Liberty, Johnny’s neighbor, and she’s strangling Johnny with the power cable from his $2,000 stereo for playing speed metal at 3a.m.
While this is one of the more common reasons for inconsiderate acts of loud, there are others that don’t easily fit into the realm of obvious jackassery. Sometimes our neighbors just aren’t from the same culture; foreign or domestic. Do we get angry? It would be easy to take the default answer and be understanding if most people could be dissuaded from such trespasses with but one polite request.
What do we do then when it’s not simply someone being inconsiderate? Our fellow students from abroad can only speak to family members late at night due to time zone conflicts. Some people just tend to stay up late, therefore socializing in what to others is the very early morning. Can we have all of this and still have an expectation of quiet? We have laws for this kind of thing, and even dorms have Resident Assistants who are there to maintain politeness, but can we only have polite society by force, or in the case of dorms, official nagging?
Of course these sorts of things go beyond noise. Bad cooks consistently burn food so others are treated to the enticing aroma of what happens when you abuse a red onion. Others simply use exotic spices with long-lasting “aromas.” So what do we do? Do we become martyrs to politeness and take it on the chin? What do you do? Write in and let us know.