When I was in sixth grade at St. Andrews school, I experienced the most embarrassing moment of my short life to that point. It was when I learned that the Nuns had voted me “king of courtesy” because of my caring attitude and good manners. That was not such a bad deal and was sure to put a smile on my mother’s face.

No, the ignominy came when I learned that I, along with Kathy Pero (queen of courtesy) would be announced before an assembly of all students grades 1-8 and would march in a procession before said assembly wearing a paper mache crown. As we marched to the cascade of snickers, laughs and finger pointing, I swore to myself “I’ll never be courteous again.”

Thankfully, I was not able to keep the promise, and manners crept back into my life. As a matter of fact, I still sometimes get comments from strangers when I open the car door for my wife. You mean everyone doesn’t do that? But it appears that plenty of others “got the memo” this year and decided that manners are for paper mache crown wearing wimps.

The latest poster child for rudeness is the (less than) honorable U.S. Representative Joe Wilson, from South Carolina. In his bizarre world, it is somehow okay to scream “you lie” to the President of the United States while he is addressing a nationally televised joint session of congress. His ignorant remark was further punctuated by an angrily contorted face and a finger wag. Wow, I thought, I haven’t seen manners that bad since, well, a few weeks earlier at the town hall meetings across the country. If they demonstrated nothing else, these meetings proved one thing abundantly clearly- manners are definitely an endangered species in our country.

Used to be you need to commit some heinous offense, like cutting someone off in traffic, to provoke that kind of ire. Now all it seems to take is the audacity to have a different point of view from one-another (aided by a little prodding from the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Keith Olbermann or the always quotable Sarah Palin).

At least someone still knows how to demonstrate good manners. By taking the high road, when many more of us would not or could not, President Obama once again demonstrated class. Whether you approve of his politics or not, his classy, well mannered demeanor is an example to us all. Now that’s the moment that all of our kids needed to watch…

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 12th, 2009 at 10:31 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.