ManicDDaily

I just wanted to add a few things to my blog of yesterday, “Incredulous in Florida”.

In my experience, Florida is a very polite place by and large.  (By Florida, I mean the central coast, which is the only part I know.)  (I also don’t mean Florida on the roadside, that is, Floridians when driving.)

My sense, having grown up in Maryland, is that this civility is really a Southern trait, not just Floridian.

The politeness, which seems to be paired with a kind of patience (or at least an absence of the headlong rush typical of New York), is a great boon to the older people who live here.  Clerks in stores, for example, wait without noticeable toe-tapping or audible sighs when older people rifle through purses and wallets at counters to count out exact change.  (I don’t mean disrespect to older people here—I do plenty of rifling through my own purse.  I just know that my parents, for example, one of whom has Parkinson’s disease, are much slower in the purse/wallet area than they used to be.)

Problems with this insistence on rules of politeness can arise.  Taking my parents as the example again, increasing deafness has sometimes led them to fail to hear or understand the cues for their side of the exchange.  This occasional (and always completely inadvertant) lapse has led to real misunderstandings, where because the rules weren’t deemed to be followed on both sides, blow-ups suddenly occurred:  hurricane roofers have walked irrevocably off jobs, (incompetent but available) replacement hurricane  contractors have huffed and puffed and found an excuse for not showing up weeks at a time, and hospital nurses have occasionally required long session sof placating.

Which brings up two things.  First, on the personal side, with respect to my conversation with my car service driver yesterday:  despite mentioning in my post (my) yelling, we both managed to keep things on a friendly (if sometimes incredulous) level.   I was conscious that I did not want to make the reputation of New York in Florida worse, and apologized repeatedly for my aggressive style of argument;  the car service guy graciously laughed and said it was the best ride he’d had in a long while.   (I’m sorry to say that I even wondered whether a heated argument between two strangers in the Northeast would have ended in as friendly and polite a fashion.)

On the political side, this backdrop of Southern civility, makes Joe Wilson’s shout of “you lie!” during Obama’s speech even more outrageous.   The guy simply decided that normal rules of civility, (rules that have probably drummed into him since birth, given that he is from South Carolina),  just didn’t apply in the case of Obama.    Pretty awful.