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America The Rude
America has come undone. Is there a way back?
Recently I was in a local grocery store. I was headed for the check-out line and a well-dressed woman cut in front of me. So much for Midwest niceness. I said excuse me?? She looked at me and said “Sorry I didn’t see you there!” and continued on to the register.
This is why people get in fights with strangers in public. People are busier, angrier and ruder. Their entitled life has been shattered. Many are in denial their lives have changed, even if they are well-off.
There is no planet for them to escape to, a planet without Covid. They are stuck here with the rest of us common folk.
During the pandemic, disorderly, rude, and unhinged conduct seems to have caught on as much as bread baking and Bridgerton. Bad behavior of all kinds — everything from rudeness and carelessness to physical violence — has increased, as the journalist Matt Yglesias pointed out in a Substack essay earlier this year. Americans are driving more recklessly, crashing their cars and killing pedestrians at higher rates. Early 2021 saw the highest number of “unruly passenger” incidents ever, according to the FAA. In February, a plane bound for Washington, D.C., had to make an emergency landing in Kansas City, Missouri, after a man tried to break into the cockpit.
