by Alexander Howard

Created on: June 09, 2009   Last Updated: June 10, 2009

I am a young man, so naturally it is my generation and I who get lambasted with driving society in to despair and ruin. Dropping our "sirs and ma'ams" and "please and thank yous" have constantly been cited as the tip of the iceberg, linked to rising crime, drug use, and the overall hedonism of modern society. Somehow, manners became the canary in the coal mine, and their disappearance means that we are all doomed.

But that is not how I see it. Manners have not disappeared, never to return. Rather, the nature of the game has changed.

If you want to know where good manners have gone, you must ride in mass transit, specifically trains and buses. These vehicles serve as catalysts for examining where and when "good" manners appear. I ride mass transit a lot. I have constantly used trains, plains and buses as how to get between point A and point B.

Case it point, I was taking on a nine hour Amtrak ride, the red eye from Philly to Boston. At some point, the elderly couple in the seat in front of me, who had been airing their personal lives for all the hear from the time that they were on the train, stood up to get off. Like every passenger on an Amtrak train, they had stored their luggage in the overhead. I glanced up from my book, the idea of possibly facilitating their leaving faster by helping them with their luggage, and in that instance, I made eye contact with the wife, who was waiting for her husband to deal with their carry-on. It was enough for her to state, staring me in the eyes, that "these kids today have no manners. They don't help with the luggage." I froze. It was a no-win situation. By continuing with my original response, which was to help (albeit, for a selfish reason: to get her to leave) I would allow her to think that she had shamed me into action. If I failed to help, I proved her point.

Luckily for me, I was preempted by her husband, who dropped the last of their luggage into the aisle and replied "So what? If they don't want to help me, I won't help them."

And therein lies the crux of my argument. Manners have not gone away. They have changed to be an opt-in situation. Someone important once said "treat others as you yourself would be treated." Manners are similar. If you want to get some help, you need to ask. In that same ride, I witnessed a young girl, who had sat a number of seats away from her luggage ask a young man across the aisle from me help her get her luggage down. And he complied. He did it without a word,

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