We hear, either through anecdotal evidence or through studies, that American society has a rudeness problem. We are apparently too busy or concerned with our personal lives to take the time to be nice to others in a wide variety of contexts. Blame is laid at the feet of many entities, such as technology or our employers or our lack of deeper religious instruction or some other such thing.

Assuming American society is getting ruder, I'm not particularly bothered. I have a social code by which I judge people and their actions and if they fail that code, sometimes I get annoyed with them. Occasionally, that annoyance turns to public or private displeasure. I'm not going to curtail my judgments if I feel someone has done something wrong or stupid and if society thinks I should hold back just to be nicer. I expect no less from everyone else. Being nice to others is often in our personal interests and I think a lot of the reverse-rudeness we see is people getting angry with others not realizing this, but I'm not going to apologize to someone who IS a jackass, who ACTS like a jackass, and who DESERVES to be treated like a jackass.

Now, we can turn the discussion to how and why those value judgments against others are made, but I'm not going to blame someone or some group for (what likely is) an increase in my disagreement with others and what they do. It's my decision to decide to be rude towards someone else and to allow their actions to get to me enough where I feel I must say or do something in return. And if someone thinks I've done something worthy of rudeness, that's their prerogative. Perhaps we can be equally rude towards each other and establish a new (lower) standard of communication while we work out our differences. :)

Of course, this is in a context where my interests aren't superficially aligned with my own. That's one reason why people feel so stressed at work: their interests change when they are employed to do a job for their customers. We have to deal with a wider range of strangers and weird behavior and we have to uphold our employer's reputation as well as our own. As customers, they have a higher priority than us by default. We know deep down that the Customer Is Not Always Right, but we have to maintain that in attitude order to keep their business. Business demands a higher level of tolerance in order to stay in business.

If I had to lay the majority of blame at the feet of anything, it would be the increasing creep of an entitlement mentality in the United States. It seems people feel entitled to more and more each year: prescription drug benefits, jobs secure from outsourcing, decency on mass media, etc. Obviously, these larger political questions don't play much into how you are treated by strangers on the street if you accidentally bump into them. But if people clamor for the larger issues, the justifications for those issues, I'm willing to bet, filter down into the smaller choices they make every day. Additionally, while the mentality may not be the reason for the rudeness, it can greatly contribute to it. If I feel entitled to your possessions during times of need, you may respond quite rudely that I do not have the right to your things unless I ask and receive permission. I can get kinda rude when others demand I sacrifice my things and myself for others.

Being rude towards others as a default starting point is the wrong way to conduct yourself because rudeness is often counter-productive to efficient problem solving, not to mention building healthy relationships that can help you in the long term. Insults can slow down processes and get in the way of fixing something because people get more concerned with upholding their honor and integrity to verbal assaults than with focusing on the issue at hand. This is one of the reasons why I start off with negative feelings towards politicians and their associates.