I mourn the death of good manners

As a person who is a member of your parents' generation, I will note that a lot of what you note is valid.

But that knife cuts on both sides. While I make a valiant effort to be civil and kind on most occasions, I'm not a doormat.

When confronted with a raving and screaming fool, I tend to lose my ability to tolerate idiocy gladly in fairly short order. And as such, I'm always the guy who starts smarting off to the dimwit who is abusing the store clerk because they ran out of the specific item they wanted, or because their strawberries were too green, or they don't like the food they selected for themselves from the Buffet, or whatever.

It's amazing how they cringe, though, when the person behind them in line takes the side of the clerk they are abusing.

Heh! It's fun. And beyond that, where's the fun in being polite and civil to fools?

Sometimes you have to line them out. Although I think if more people did it, the incidence of excessive whining and blatant abuse would decline markedly.

In fact, that's probably the problem. It's not the "kindness", per-se. It's the lack of community disapproval that allows it to go on. But then again, I'm big, mean, ugly, and probably armed, so I don't worry about someone going nuts on me, either. It's their choice. But a lot of it has more to do with the fact that nobody is willing to call the nitwits on the fact that they are being nitwits, right there on the spot.

Beautiful sentiments. That could have been written by my mother, and she was born in 1894.

http://perilloux.org/mother.htm