“Please come to Boston for the Springtime…She said, ‘No.’”—David Loggins (“Please Come to Boston”)
I can’t blame her. I’ve visited Boston and the Boston area a number of times, and almost every one of those visits stands out in memory as an experience with rudeness. So, I was surprised to see in a recent survey that Boston ranks only sixth in rudeness among America’s rudest cities. * And I was surprised to see the ranking for rudest city was a place where I once lived.
I wasn’t surprised to see that the City of Brotherly Love is ruder than Boston, but I was surprised by Louisville’s ranking at number 4 and Miami’s ranking as the rudest American city. I lived in Miami for awhile in the early eighties and found it to be not so much rude as indifferent. I attributed that apathy to the large number of snowbirds and the wary Cuban refugees who were still making their lives in a new land and growing city.
The list of cities ranked by rudeness is hardly objective. Its classifications are based on what irks people, like loud talking on a speakerphone in a public space. I do believe places have character and that even a casual visit by a stranger can reveal the nature of that character. But such character is based largely on anecdotal evidence. I have such anecdotes from Boston and the surrounding area. But I suppose my own subjectivity is tainted by just a few such anecdotes.
For example, Boston traffic is mean traffic, that is, it’s streets are peopled by rude drivers who don’t yield unless they are headed for an imminent accident. Don’t look to be let into a traffic line in Boston. Once after waiting to merge in a van with the university’s logo on the side, I found myself ushered into traffic by a truck driver who, recognizing the school name and knowing its location, said over his CB: “This ain’t nothin’ like Pittsburgh. Nobody lets anybody in around here.” And Boston traffic wouldn't be Boston traffic without incidents of road rage. In warm weather drivers with windows down aren't timid about expressing their displeasure with other drivers. Similarly, during a visit to Harvard in a time before navigation systems, I tried to stop people on the street to ask for directions only to find myself ignored (head-turning leper-avoiding ignored) until a fellow from Pittsburgh stopped to direct me, saying “Yeah, I’ve lived here for awhile and found people are like that here.” I could relate other stories of rudeness, but then, they’re only anecdotes, not hard evidence.
Places change as influences change. The survey of rudest cities indicates that rankings have changed because the pandemic and politics of the past eight years have influenced thought and behavior. All those shut-in days didn’t help socialization.
Since the rise of modern media and its obsession with round-the-clock political punditry and social media’s anonymous commentary, the country has probably become a bit more rude—okay, maybe a lot ruder. Certainly, it has become cruder, “effing” punctuating even the language of women who have adopted male construction-worker-site and locker room talk. Movies and even streaming TV series also reveal a creeping rudeness and crudity, the latter contributing to the nature of the former.
And there’s little shame exhibited by those who are crude or rude in public. I’ve witnessed both behaviors on sidewalks in small towns. You have seen it on YouTube videos.
Not that people haven’t always been crude or rude, but generally, I believe, we have across the western world raised the lowest common denominator of public behavior and language to mainstream and in the US to Main Street.
I doubt the pendulum of manners will swing the other way in the near future. The mechanism is rusted. But an historical reality check tells me that it might always have been rusty. The so-called polite Victorian society of England had a dark crude underside of pornographic novels and open prostitution. Maybe the crude and rude have always peopled civilization, and it’s just with the advent of 24/7 media and ubiquitous cameras added to a lust for polling by news organizations that we have taken notice of our darker side.
Nevertheless, I can’t help thinking that manners, if not dead, are rare behaviors and will become rarer.
*https://nypost.com/2024/09/16/lifestyle/the-rudest-city-is-not-what-youd-expect-survey/ and also:
Preply.com Online at:
https://preply.com/en/blog/rudest-cities-2024/?sscid=91k8_n03i4&utm_source=affiliate&utm_medium=cpa&utm_campaign=stu_aff_generic_all_0_mul_xx_multiplesub_r-shareasale-offernov2021&utm_content=314743
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