I'm not sure how to empirically measure incivility but it seems like it might be... There's certainly been an uptick in things from reckless driving to drinking to drug overdoses. There's a lot of anecdata from nurses, airline attendants, teachers, etc. about bad behavior being on the rise.
Maybe it's all just due to the stress of the ongoing pandemic. But, some of the articles below point out that these trends began before the pandemic.
Correlation is not causation, but we've been on a 50+ year crusade in American culture to destroy any sort of multi-economic-strata commons.
IMHO, the affluent suburbs in the article are both a symptom- and cause-of rudeness. Most of these kids have never worked a customer service job for minimum wage. It's possible even their parents haven't.
And that's not bad, per se, but if the problem is "People treat customer service workers like shit," then you could start at worse places than empathetic employment experience.
Personal vendetta, but Starbucks is emblematic of all that is wrong with American culture. We took the coffee shop -- a local, counter-culture, loitering-tolerant, independently-run staple of American life -- and replaced it with Walmart (+some feel-good PR).
And as a result, any unreasonable adult is catered to, because corporate policy is to make you feel special. When in reality, you should be banned from the premises after your second meltdown. /gripe
“large segment of the population consists of jerks “
I think it starts at the top. People are realizing that companies are run for the benefit of a few and these few also have an outsized influence on politics. It’s not surprising that people are feeling disenfranchised and mainly out for themselves.
For me the 2008 bailouts were the turning point. A lot of the Wall Street people who had preached “creative destruction” for a long time suddenly demanded government bailouts when the destruction reached them. And unfortunately they were given bailouts. And they were given the bailouts in a way that mainly benefitted the wealthy while homeowners still lost their homes. Same happened with Covid: the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. No wonder a lot do people don’t feel at home in this society anymore.
I'm not sure how to empirically measure incivility but it seems like it might be... There's certainly been an uptick in things from reckless driving to drinking to drug overdoses. There's a lot of anecdata from nurses, airline attendants, teachers, etc. about bad behavior being on the rise.
Maybe it's all just due to the stress of the ongoing pandemic. But, some of the articles below point out that these trends began before the pandemic.
Examples:
[1] All kinds of bad behavior is on the rise https://www.slowboring.com/p/all-kinds-of-bad-behavior-is-on...
[2] As America reopens, businesses — from airlines to arenas — see an uptick in bad behavior https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/11/as-america-reopens-businesse...
[3] America Is Falling Apart at the Seams https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/13/opinion/america-falling-a...