Dan Rather
Please ..."
"Thank you."
"You're welcome."
This trio is probably the first formal piece of social interaction any of us learns -- with maternal prompts to say "the magic word" and follow up with the proper expression of gratitude. Spend any time around young ones and their parents, and you'll hear this exchange repeated endlessly. Talk to newcomers to America who are just learning English, and you might hear that the "please-thank-you-you're-welcome" troika is, with all its elegant simplicity, one of their favourite features of our language. But for those of us who are in adulthood and have been speaking English all our lives, have these lessons stuck?
RENEWED GUSTO
In your reporter's experience, admittedly anecdotal, they have -- particularly in what some might regard as the unlikeliest of places, New York City. In all precincts of this famously -- or infamously -- brusque metropolis, one can hear these markers of civilisation being exchanged with what seems to be renewed gusto.
Perhaps only from the perspective of a New Yorker would this be considered noteworthy. But when you hear the full back-and-forth (as opposed to the more common truncated and grunted variations on the theme) repeated three times in a five-minute trip around the corner to get a cup of coffee, you take notice. You realise that you might be on to a symptom of a wider outbreak of civility. You talk to others, and find they have noticed much the same.
This isn't just the codified politeness of shopkeepers and bodega clerks that I'm talking about -- this is something that can be witnessed right out on the city streets, among everyday people looking to squeeze past on crowded sidewalks, holding doors for those weighed down with packages, and helping mothers with strollers up subway stairs (fathers tend to wave away offers of aid -- "No thank you."). The words, and the acts that inspire them, speak of an effort to get along, to lend a hand, to appreciate one another, on a grass roots level.
Which is, perhaps, what makes the phenomenon so remarkable. On the one side, you have the democratic spirit put into wonderful action, with people of all races, ethnicities and socio-economic backgrounds managing harmonious co-operation on a small scale; on the other side, you have a national political culture that is more attack-oriented than at any time in recent memory. Our campaigns, our public debates and the very gears and levers of our government have, far from being lubricated by civility, become inundated by vitriol.
So if we are, in fact, dealing with each other with more one-on-one courtesy, is some sort of equilibrium effect at work? Are we in some way reacting to the poisoning of public discourse with our own personal antidotes -- not only in New York, but all around this country?
CONFLICT
Or could we be seeing the different ways in which two different kinds of entities -- institutions and individuals -- deal with the same set of circumstances? On the institutional level, 9/11, and the wars and political climate that have spun out from that day, has been largely about conflict. Conflict between civilisations, conflict between different strategies for fighting terrorism, conflict between belief systems in a rapidly polarising society.
But on the level of the individual, many of the same forces have reminded us of just how much we rely on each other. On rescue workers, on members of our armed forces, and on the person in the house or apartment or office next door down. Maybe that's why so many of us now seem readier to ask for help, to give it and to express our gratitude in the nicest possible terms.
Dan Rather is a television broadcaster.
