Manners’
are often taught strategically to children because these are skills that will be
carried with them- always. Start them off early; they’re on the road to
success. Because these essential niceties portray to the world, “Your momma
raised your right,” mostly any parent will regard these lessons as ongoing
moments for teaching, and most children have a recollection of at some point
hearing loving reminders to “Say thank you”, or “Don’t forget to say excuse me/please.”
On the other hand, perhaps there are children raised in a home that didn’t
value or place emphases on saying thank you, please, or excuse me. You could then
easily presume these lessons were instead given importance and presented to
them in school. With today’s technology driven world, lessons of good manners from
our parents and our school teachers might somehow be eclipsed, after all, when
we’re taking that call in the middle of someone speaking to us, we have no time
to consider manners, right? What it
seems we have to do is renovate our manners to keep up with our ever changing,
technically driven world. “Today's new technology, ideas and innovations bring
with them a need for a whole new set of rituals, customs and, above all else,
good manners.”
To teach
children manners is also teaching them a pathway to success and a key
ingredient to ascertaining their goals. It endows them with healthy
communication skills, thereby equipping them with integral tools that help to
assure their success.
Without question, human behavior should be encouraged to be compassionate,
polite and appropriate. “Good manners,” etiquette expert Amy Vanderbilt once
said, “Have much to do with the emotions. To make them ring true, one must feel
them, not merely exhibit them.”
Though
as a child you’re taught the semantics of displaying good manners, you might
not learn the importance of them until you are older and have a better pulse of
how the world operates and how it will treat you. “Manners are a codified way
each culture has for keeping things pleasant even when we’d rather not.” We are
only human, we may not mean each “Thank You” or “How are you?’ that we utter with
guttural authenticity, but we say them because it’s an assumed, pay it forward,
notion that gives homage to the old adage of treat others how you would wish to
be treated.
Why all of this hoopla and finger
shaking at the ideas of learning and executing manners? I recently experienced a situation where I
encountered an adult who led me to ponder this assumption. With the mere fact someone has
reached adulthood, should we assume them to have manners and good etiquette? I’d
like to think so, but it seems this correlation isn’t the case. In my circumstance,
the story goes that I wasn’t able to attend a celebration, and for a very good
reason. My absence was excused and to further show my respect for the
celebration, after the fact, I mailed a gift. Days went by and there was no reciprocal response or even a
confirmation of receipt for my deed. After
more days passed, I begrudgingly reached out to the person and in response, was
barley given a paltry, “Oh, yes I received it-thanks”. Technically gratitude
was shown, but it was aloof and disingenuous. It’s been said that if you’re
doing something just for the appraisal, perhaps you shouldn’t be doing it all,
but I could argue expecting others to show their manners isn’t the same as doing
something just for the sake of fluffing one’s ego.
The essence of good manners says,
“Good manners do not ask you to give up life, limb, personal
health or significant amounts of money.
Instead, it calls for civility and respect for others expressed in word
and deed.” It isn’t important to know if the attempt in my case was
disingenuous or not, but to simply put forth an effort in displaying manners
speaks volumes of one’s own character and compassionate abilities toward
others. As I am continuing to learn how the world and its inhabitants operate,
and I doubt I am alone in this enigma, I am coming to grips that my stoic
paradigm of simply being an adult and therefore having manners are maybe not
inherently connected at all.
If
you aren’t someone that is quick to say “Bless you” when you hear another
sneeze, or you fail to leave the elevator open for someone running toward it,
could you honestly be deemed as someone
that is unkind or uncaring, probably not. However, what could be
considered with people that “forget” their manners is that their moral
contradictions of being nice, yet failing to have manners are something that loudly
signifies a discourteous person.
Could
this ill-mannered behavior be attributed to that fact that we are seemingly living
in an impolite society who’s its own victim to its own cultural
transformations? In the spirit of playing devil’s advocate, we could blame this
lack of awareness or lack of trying at all on the calamity of technology and
the resulting downfall of people skills. We now live in a society where cyber
bullying is common place; people can discreetly make malevolent comments and
never be identified. You can answer your cell phones during dinner time; or you
can even bang out a text message as someone is attempting to have a
conversation with you. These are things that currently occur within our society
and portray a lack of manners each and every day.
Are
we all just victims to our own hi-tech civilization, simply forgetting the
lessons that were taught to us as children? Does this mean by virtue of the
fact that our society is ill mannered that we are too?
