The Morality of a Living Wage

Los Angeles County, a region with which I am well familiar, recently approved a minimum wage hike to $15 an hour over the next several years.

I'll admit that when the $15 an hour minimum wage was initially being discussed - towards the tail end of the Occupy movement and shortly before a measure to establish the wage appeared on a Seattle ballot - I was skeptical of the idea and disposed to oppose it on the typical economic alarmism and sneering at the demographic stereotypically assigned to such jobs.

After having the discussion over and over again, and researching the issue, I eventually came around. By the time the LA County bill passed, I was getting pissed off by short sighted and flawed macros such as this one, which was running the conservative circuit on my Facebook feed today:

Besides the fact that this seems to think that the minimum wage would only apply to fast food workers, rather than raising everyone's wages; it also ignores the critical fact that the emergency personnel (as well as many retail clerks, military personnel, office professionals, manual laborers, and professional artists) are in fact also severely underpaid. It suffers from an elitist conceit that appears to argue that, because a person is new to the workforce, or performs a menial task, they are not permitted to make enough money.

I entered into an argument over a similar graphic to this one and was so put off by my opponent's cavalier dismissal of basic human dignity (complaining that such dignity comes at the expense of making him pay a marginal increase in his cost of living) that I collected the various data that had informed my reformed opinion.

Society is a cooperative enterprise. In the various liberal traditions, including democratic ones such as our republic, that enterprise further becomes collaborative. The system exists for the benefit of everyone, not simply to prop up the lifestyles of a few elite. We are remiss if we do not maintain this cooperation or advance the enterprise in a way that at is at least as beneficial to subsequent generations, and we ought to strive to constantly improve. To promote a paradigm in which entire segments of society are impoverished is antithetical to the entire premise. This is the gestalt behind the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, which established that workers will receive wages sufficient to maintain “the minimum standard of living necessary for health, efficiency, and general well-being.” These words, appear to me to establish that there is a legal requirement that the minimum wage be a living wage.

An easy way to check the level "necessary for health, efficiency, and general well-being" is to examine the welfare system. This system, established as a safety net, is designed to meet the needs of a person and their dependents in a manner consistent with basic human dignity. A 2013 study by the CATO institute concluded that 34 states and the District of Columbia pay welfare benefits with a value above the minimum wage. Of the 16 other states, 10 of them are among the states with the lowest cost of living in the nation and 6 of them - Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, Idaho, Florida, and Kentucky - are in the bottom quartile of national average income. And a recent DoD review found that record numbers of soldiers were on supplemental income - primarily food stamps - in 2014. 

The fact that the economic safety net is set at a level above the minimum amount of money we agree can be paid to a person is the clearest possible indicator that the minimum wage is too low.

What does the social safety net say a dignified wage is? In California, the maximum welfare benefit is equivalent to a pre-tax income of $37,160/year, or $17.87/hour. This benefit includes support for dependents, as the MIT calculator for a single person living in LA county with no dependents needs to make $12.44/hour - an increase of 38% over the current state minimum wage and 24.4% over the state minimum wage in January of 2016. A couple with one person working needs to make $19.53/hour. A single parent needs to make over $25/hour. 

The California minimum wage in 2016, $10/hr, will still fail to match the highest buying power the minimum wage has had - the minimum wage in 1968 had an inflation-adjusted purchasing power of $10.51 in 2012.

In the post-recession economy, we are not just talking about 16 year old kids starting their first jobs when we talk about the minimum wage. We are talking about people re-entering the workplace. We are talking about people who had to accept any job they could find after layoffs. In 2013, Pew estimated that as many as half of minimum wage workers were adults. The 2013 Bureau of Labor Statistics report shows 49.6% of workers making minimum wage or lower were over the age of 25. The economic policy institute shows that the average age of a minimum wage worker is 35. 88% of them are over 20 and 28% have children. 55% work full-time.

This means that when we talk about keeping the minimum wage too low to make a living, we are impoverishing people who are trying to support families and in many cases find a way back to a job they lost circa 2008 through no fault of their own. We are additionally impoverishing people who, without additional income, are likely to become saddled with student debt, if they can pursue an education at all. These same people are increasingly likely to return to live at home, if they can ever reach a financial position to leave in the first place.

So in 34 states and the District of Columbia, the social safety net is not simply helping people "get back on their feet". The social safety net is practically a part of the wage structure. In nearly 75% of the nation, business is allowed to operate with increased overhead because the government is subsidizing wages for them. In cases where workers are holding two or three part-time jobs which are not required to provide any benefits, the government is also subsidizing the benefits.

It's time to adjust the wage.

The Shrine of an Idiot God

While I am sympathetic for many reasons, I am increasingly of the opinion that one of the greatest recommendations of the monarchic system is that it has as an effect the disenfranchisement of essentially the entirety of a societies many, many idiots.

This has no bearing on the actual quantity of idiots present, or their vociferousness, but so long as the particular idiot that you hear is not the monarch, you can take comfort in the absolute knowledge that this idiot is not, and never will be, dictating policy. In this day and age I think nobody can deny the appeal of that sort of assured impotence in ones ideological opposition.

Imagine what changes there would be in our approach to discourse, which in the internet age is more prolific than ever, if it were known by both parties that their discussions are nothing but the exploration of hypotheticals? Without the illusion that anything said by any pundit has the slightest influence on policy, what good could getting worked up possibly do? From whence would come vitriol? Perhaps it is out of the habit of a lifetimes under a crown that gave our forefathers their seemingly effortless ability to discuss passionately matters of state, then just as quickly turn from them to more mundane subjects: a deeply ingrained belief that nothing they wrote actually had import or impact.

So what if the monarch is not brilliant, a master statesman? So what if now and again the monarch is one of the idiots? That is actually another upside which is critical to the contentment of the populace: Someone concrete to blame.


The monarch, as the State incarnate, literally is responsible personally for the well-being or otherwise of their subjects. If there is one thing that can be proven by the rantings of the people - of their blame casting and religious fervor and conspiracy theorizing and appeals to the state to intervene somehow - it is that the people above all want to know that someone is ultimately in charge. Not some amorphous, intangible Congress or Parliament. One solitary individual. Human nature all but demands a king.

And why not? Better to have one person in charge than this Byzantine mess of shifting allegiances and untraceable accountabilities. One person under whom we all thrive together or not; one person who is trained in the art of statecraft and who may even excel in it, potentially to bring us to new heights.

Let's not forget that the vast majority of governments have been some form of autocracy. The bulk of human achievement - art, technology, civics, literature, philosophy - has been accomplished under these conditions. The greatest and widest and longest lived empires the world has seen were united under a crown. Let's stop pretending that this is an accident.

Let's stop pretending that populist doublethink has truly improved upon tried and true methods. Let's abandon the idea that democracy and republicanism are new developments and logical progressions of autocratic government, when in fact these institutions date back to the ancient world. Let's stop pretending that by forcing politicians to pander to the populace for votes that we have attained greater transparency or accountability in our government; or that the plebians are even entitled to a hand at statecraft. Let's abandon that notion that says that all of us are better than some of us. Let's stop pretending that it isn't stupid to believe that democracy isn't mediocrity enshrined: that the law of averages somehow works in our favor in the long run.

Let's give monarchy another go of it.

Do You Want to Live Longer?

Collected from my exploits elsewhere on the internet.

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"Want to live longer? Eat a Mediterranean diet. The Florentine - Elixir of Life?

It takes time to plan and execute a meal. It takes even more time to learn how to cook, and on top of that there are all the mistakes and what-have-you that inevitably come with learning a skill. People seem always to be looking for a quick and easy solution rather than putting forth the effort needed for a gauranteed result. Want to lose weight, get healthy and live longer? You could eat well (which requires planning and preparation) and exercise daily (which requires, well, exercise). OR you could take a gamble on three easy payments ...

For what it's worth, it is actually less expensive to eat well. Take a look at this survey of families from around the world. Each picture is of a family, the food they buy in a week, and what they spend on it (translated into USD where necessary):
One Week's Worth of Food Around Our Planet

Notice anything? There's a sweet spot right around the $200 mark where the people are both well off AND not spending a fortune on food. How do they achieve it? Lots of grains, lots of produce, a fresh meat meal and minimal microwave goods. Surprise, surprise.

The thing is, the culture of convenience is attacking our lifespans in more ways than just our diets. The post which began this discussion was presented with the question "Want to live longer?" and there are many factors that go into a long and healthy life (because who wants to spend the last 20 years out of 100 bedridden?) that are all put in jeopardy by the demands of modern life. Not only is the home-cooked meal now the exception rather than the rule, but so have the morning constitutional, the family game night, and in many cases life-long friends started to become exceedingly rare things. If you want to live to be 100 - and be hale and hardy, too - here's a video ya'll should watch. The presenter found several communities with an unusual number of centegenarians (Yes, one of them was in Italy) and set out to find out what they had in common. The answers may surprise you.

TED.com - "How To Live To be 100" by Dan Buettner

The Mad Jack Takes On Michael Shanklin

Collected from elsewhere on the internet, these were my comments to Mr. Shanklin regarding his naïve anarchistic beliefs. All anarchism is unrealistic, but his ideas regarding every person being subject to no law other than that which they choose for themselves was especially appalling in its sheer, blind idiocy.

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"So what you are saying is that you are someone who would gladly force your will on others, murder for profit, and ensure that NO ONE is free just as long as you are getting something in return?" etc, etc, ad nauseam ...
I love how good you anarchists are at making stuff up. It must be wonderful to have such active imaginations and such a detailed fantasy world to live in.
In fact, I believe quite the opposite. Which is why I am no anarchist and I do not support a stateless society. Anarchy and Statelessness are only possible in a world filled with a type of person that is actually so rare in reality that it is almost fair to say that the advocates of such "systems" are experiencing an almost total disconnect from reality. The truly amusing thing is that for everyone to be "free" absent a state, all ambition, striving and competition will have to be somehow culled from the race: in reality, an anarchist or stateless society would collapse as soon as the first punch is thrown.
That is, anarchy is more dependent on "sheeple" for "success" (for what success is there to be had without striving and ambition?) than any other government concept in the history of man.
Until sociopathy is cured, until there are no jerks left in the world, until a way of imbuing each generation with a total and homogenous sense of morality is accomplished, anarchy and/or statelessness is impossible. And as the proud and rather arrogant owner of certain qualities, such as ambition and a general disregard for useless people; it makes me happy to say that there will be no anarchy or statelessness within my lifetime.
"Once people take the time to research dispute resolution organizations and competing law, they will realize how it is the future ..."
A person who attends Berkeley is more likely to have liberal ideas, a person who attends Georgetown more likely to have conservative ideas. I suppose if you spend all your time reading fantasies, you're more likely to be an anarchist.
Your arguments aren't arguments at all, Shanklin. Simply declarations. "It will NOT be as you say! It will be GLORIOUS!" and waiting for your choir to shout "Amen! Preach it Brother!" behind you. Which I suppose might be construed as an argument to popularity, but I'll grant the benefit of the doubt and not invent things whole cloth the way your friends, such as Mr. Mathewson, have been doing.
You say we need education? Educate us. But I don't believe your system has what it takes to suffer dissent and come out ahead. It takes a society full of anarchists to make an anarchist society, and that sounds like the very antithesis of freedom of thought to me.
Especially given what I've seen of anarchists and their intolerance and hysterical decrial of anything that's NOT anarchy ...since I support some form of a state, I must constitute a threat to your freedom, no? Does that or does that not make me a target for any "freedom fighter" out there who wishes to silence my voice? If it does not, what law will avenge me when cooler heads do not prevail?
If I and people like me are allowed to live, your statelessness will collapse. If we are murdered for the sake of your precious homogeny of thought, then statelessness never was.

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The following was my next post in the discussion.

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"Murderers would be sought much harder in a free society"
By what law or right? You simply declare it to be so when in fact you have no support for your declaration. They may be pursued harder, but will they be pursued fairly? Who is to guarantee that the right person is pursued? Who is to prevent the phrase "Dead or Alive" (or simply "Dead") from preventing a person seeing trial?
What happens when Posse X, hired by Grieving Widow A, encounters Posse Y, hired to protect Suspect B? With no law, there is nothing illegal about it. It might be immoral, but that hasn't stopped anyone's dollars from buying force, violence, and coercion, which will be valuable and highly sought commodities on an open market. What happens when Posse X is a group of folks who hunt as their day job and take bounties for the general welfare; but Posse Y is a company by the name of Blackwater? After the shootout, has justice been served?
By what law or right does the killing finally stop?
I'm a fan of Westerns, too, but I understand why the people of Texas, Arizona, California, Colorado, Utah, etc, were glad to have real law come about at the turn of the century.
"Government is coercion, and unneeded."
More declarations. I've got one of my own:
Any reasonable study of human history and nature will reveal that total freedom and lawlessness are unsupportable systems. What then arises is the pragmatic issue of What and How Much freedom it is necessary to sacrifice in order for everyone to maximize the amount enjoyed by the largest number of people.

Shocked Out of Cultural Relativism

I realize I have been neglecting this blog somewhat, but fortunately that does not mean that I've not been opining elsewhere. The following - which will apply to most, if not all, of the posts I will be making over the next few days - comes from a discussion in which I was engaged some time back.

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I heard an anthropologist talk about an island tribe that practices ritual homosexuality and pedophilia. The superstition goes that semen = life force, and that for a male child to have enough life force to assure the continuation of the species/race/tribe/whatever that he must ingest semen from the older tribe members. This ritual fellation begins at a surprisingly early age and continues for an extensive period of time until the child is deemed to have absorbed enough life force to marry.

The men jealously guard their semen to such an extent that a husband and wife only cohabitate during a specific part of the year, during which conception is attempted. Women are viewed simply as factories for the production of children and recreational sex - and especially non-procreative sex - is not only frowned upon, but feared. During the remainder of the year, the men live together in communal barracks, segregated from the women as much as is possible.

This anthropologist presented this little tale as an illustration in favor of cultural relativism. The argument was something to the effect that This Tribe has managed to do well enough for itself and does not seem to suffer for its behaviors, which to outsiders seem (to put it perhaps TOO mildly) bizarre.

But the argument, like most of cultural relativism, only stands up in a vacuum. Has the tribe indeed done well for itself? I contend that they obviously have not. They are a stone age culture, speaking a language only they speak, perpetuating a culture that has, in fact, failed to thrive. They have no wealth, no art, and no science. Their only technology is the same technology that every people on the world has managed to develop: means to shelter themselves from the elements, and a means to procure food.

A modern look at their practice shows them to be abhorrent, because our understanding of psychology - a science, by the way, which is advanced literally thousands of years beyond their ken - reveals to us the undeniable and irreversible damage that these people do to their progeny as a matter of course. And it shows in their society: they are a culture of pederasts, fearful and distrustful of the women whom they depend on in order to perpetuate themselves and who must nurture them through those early years before they go off to the abuses of the men's barracks. This is a culture that has managed to survive not for any virtue of its own, but in spite of itself.

This culture (whose name, I'm afraid, escapes me) is not the only one of its kind, though its practices are definitely the strangest and most extreme I've yet heard of. It is tales of peoples like this, who never advanced enough in some cases to even discover fire or writing, that cured me of any Cultural Relativism. We cannot judge people in a vacuum, especially in an increasingly interconnected world. A people is only as good as its contributions to our overall advancement, and a people that never strives, that lurks in prehistoric superstition and rites must be brought forward or left behind in the dusty annals of history.

To listen to Relativists is to risk damning ourselves to the same stagnant fate.

Against Compulsory Federal Service

The following was originally posted as a reply to a friend of mine who had just heard of Rep. Charles Rangel's (asshole) bill, H.R. 5741, which would create compulsory Federal service for everyone.

This is the same Rep. Charles Rangel who was recently arrested for "ethics violations". You know it's bad when Congress has a problem with your ethics.

But on with the show.

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While I am a fan of the concept of service as a requirement for suffrage (a la Heinlein's Starship Troopers, and for many of the same reasons) such service would be meaningless if it were not voluntary (a point which I believe Heinlein also addresses in that novel). Such is a different conversation.

In a more immediate sense, compulsory service is a really bad idea, especially when it becomes understood that the traditional name for such service is a Draft. I have seen the bill, and it is definitely military in focus, the service in "homeland security" being a catch-all for those who are inadmissible for military service.

Why? Take it from a pragmatic standpoint. Today's military is an advanced professional military that uses some rather complicated equipment and tactics and therefore needs people who are capable of using them and motivated to do so. The military needs to be able to refuse people who are not only physically incapable of the demands that would be placed upon them, but also to refuse the mentally and psychologically incapable.

There has also been a cultural shift in our military over the last 20 years to change the image of the military from a bunch of rednecks, dropouts and delinquents to an organization of professionals worthy of respect. Not too long ago, young criminals were often given military service in lieu of jail time. During this same period, the public image of the military was of a group of thugs, a place for people who couldn't get their shit together any other way and who only needed to be smart enough to follow orders and shoot a gun. This is no longer the case.

Military service is now career focused. The vast majority of MOS' are support roles that simultaneously give a soldier real-world skills; and even the lowliest infantry have access to a rather generous college program. On one side of things, more and more soldiers are required to learn various computer and telecommunications-based skills, while on the other squad-based tactics have taught leadership skills to everyone. Unlike 20 years ago, a soldier leaving todays military is a respected member of society. People don't look at their resume and wonder what they did that made them need to join up. In many fields, military training is an advantage and a boon and many employers actively seek out veterans.

By making service mandatory - even if not ALL government service is military, just some of it! - the military loses all these gainss it has worked very hard to achieve over the last two decades. It becomes just another branch of the public school system.

My final point that relates strictly to the military (I will address government service in a broader sense shortly. Whether you take that as a promise or a threat is up to you) is that no soldier in a volunteer army wants a draftee watching his back. Today's military enjoys an unheard of esprit de corps. Unit cohesion is keeping combat casualties at an all time low in general and friendly fire is practically unheard of. Every person in combat today is there because they volunteered for military service AND they took a combat MOS. If you start throwing draftees into the mix, morale goes down, discipline problems rise, desertion becomes a major issue, and friendly fire casualties stop being accidents. I have a lot of friends in the military (including a Captain in the Army) and every single one of them speaks with horror and disdain at the prospect of fighting alongside a draftee. I, for one, will not dishonor our troops by inflicting such horror upon them.

They have enough to deal with.

As for government service being compulsory in general, well, it remains a bad idea. First up are the economics of the idea: Somebody has to pay these people. Now in the rest of the market, a business provides a service or product, people spend money on that product, the business makes more, etc. In this system, things are being produced, wealth is being generated. If enough people want to spend money on a product, the business can pay people to help it create and sell the product. If it hires too many, it can't afford to pay them, and has to fire some. The number of employees a business can have is contingent on the value of the service or products it generates. That value is determined by how much people are willing to spend on it.

Government work, on the other hand, is make-work. The vast majority of government employees are engaged in paperwork and redundant functions. They produce no product or service. If we pour more people into this already bloated system, we alleviate nothing. We would have to pay them, but with what? We can either cut a government program to "free up" funds, which would accomplish nothing because those funds are simply being shifted to another government program. (As Robert Anton Wilson once noted, "Bureaucracies never die, they just change names) The other option is to print more money, but since money is a representation of value, and no additional value is being produced, this simply inflates an already excessively inflated economy. The end result, economically, is either 1990's Russia or 1920's Germany.

Second is the idea of entitlement. We already have enough of a problem with it in this country, and handing people a job doesn't make it any better. A person is generally granted a job based on their own merits. Usually, this job is given to them over several other applicants. Nobody was entitled to a job, they had to work to get it and they have to work to keep it. Being a high school student might qualify someone to work at McDonald's, but telling the manager that they have to hire you is a sure way to remain jobless. The most important thing for people, especially young people, to learn - what working in a place like the grocery store or a burger joing is supposed to teach a person - is a work ethic. The understanding that work sucks, but you still have to do a good job; that at the end of the week your paycheck MEANS something, that you EARNED it, is of paramount importance.

This is not accomplished by handing out do-nothing government work to any schmuck who happens to be over 18 in America. In this compulsory service system, a person IS entitled to a job. Not only can they get the work through no virtue of their own, but they can do a piss-poor job and the government has to keep them. Two years later, these people go to get their first real job, having been "prepared", and find that this "experience" doesn't make it any easier for them to find work. Why? Because EVERYONE ELSE has the exact same experience. Which means that the professional jobs which these people are suppsed to be qualified for (having been working in an office environment for two years) aren't available. They now have to go get that same post-high-school burger flipping job. That same job that barely pays minimum wage, doesn't have a union, and enjoys such high turnover that they can - and will - gladly fire any slacker they catch taking an unauthorized smoke break. Employers, on the other hand, undoubtedly start to notice that a lot of these so-called "experienced" employees don't actually know how to work. They want vacation benefits right away. They call in sick all the damn time. They complain about working overtime. All because they never actually had to work to work before. Sure, some people will excel, get promotions, move on to better jobs, but these are the SAME people who would have done that anyway, the people who know what a work ethic is, and all that has happened in their cases is they wasted two years of their lives in government service rather than getting started on their careers.

The argument that this would create a paradigm of civic duty is also bunk. There is a large amount of evidence that the exact opposite effect would actually be created. Of note is a famous study of day care centers by two economists in the 1990's. The day care centers had a policy that the children had to be picked up by a certain time. As can be expected, some parents would usually be late each day. In a controlled experiment, some of the centers imposed a fine for parents who arrived over 10 minutes late. The result was that late pickups at the centers with the fine SKYROCKETED. The reason for this result is that before the fine, the parents were bound by a sense of duty and respect to the teachers. Those who were late were only a little late. What the fine did was allow the parents to buy off their duty. For a small fee each day, they could no longer feel guilty about being late, because they had already compensated the teachers for that inconvenience. The situation in mandating service cheapens the sense of civic duty in the same way. By making it mandatory for people to serve, we actually DECREASE the likelihood of future public service because, in the minds of these people being enlisted, they have already done their time or met their quota. What is interesting about the study is that it took place in Israel, a country that already has a service requirement. If such mandatory service did indeed create the effect of amplifying a person's sense of civic duty, we would very likely have seen completely different results.

Finally, service is meaningless if it's not voluntary. You cannot imbue someone with a sense of civic duty by forcing them into it. All that creates is resentment. Besides we already have a word for mandatory or involuntary service. That word is slavery, which was, by the way, made illegal and unConstitutional in the United States by the 13th Amendment.

A TED-Talk on Moral Subjectivism. Cultural Relativism, and the Religious Monopoly on Ethics.

I came across this Talk at www.ted.com/talks and was pleased to hear that the concept of moral objectivity and the courage to have it are being advocated in the world, and ESPECIALLY in such a prestigious venue as a TED conference.



While Sam at several points betrays a decidedly Liberal bias along with his - laudable - secularism, I agree whole-heartedly with his premise: that in order to advance humanity, we must overcome our irrational and potentially dangerous fear of judging and condemning deleterious behaviors and beliefs. Adherence to subjective morality or moral relativism are cop-outs which permit evil to exist, thrive, and eventually prey upon those around and not just within it.

Sam Harris is the author of 2004's "The End of Faith" and 2007's "Letter To A Christian Nation."

A Fine Place Worth the Fighting For

A couple of months ago I had a rather violent series of episodes in close succession. None of these crossed the threshhold to actual physical confrontations, but each of them walked right up to the line and stood there, daring someone to tempt it over the edge.

It began at a screening of Transformers. We found ourselves sitting in front of a guy and his date who were talking in an extremely irritating manner. I turned around in my seat and confronted him. "Are we going to have to listen to you idiots through the entire movie?". His response was surprisingly intense. He became irate, expressing to me a sentiment akin to "How DARE you challenge my behavior!" As I negotiated my way through his temper I became aware of my tactical disadvantage, in that should I disengage the back of my head would be turned to him, and I had been given the impression that he could not be trusted. His date began to get whiny, begging me to stop, begging him to stop, in a manner that suggested abuse. I simply held position and stared, unbeknownst to him for my own defense, and as he got continually more agitated I only replied to his accusations and threats in as non-escalating of a manner as I could manage. Finally, instead of taking a swing at me, he stormed out of the theatre.

A few weeks later I walked into a gun store to purchase a rifle. At the counter, filling out papers for what I would later learn was a shotgun, was a man about 45 years old loudly complaining about the questions being asked on the DROS Form. As I attracted the dealer's attention to begin filling out the form myself, I heard a series of comments issuing from him that not only bothered me, but were causing visible discomfort in some of the other customers:

" 'Have you ever renounced your American citizenship' Hell I renounce it every goddamn day! This damn country is going straight to hell"
"Dammit if I was a Mexican I wouldn't have to go through all of this"
"Fucking government just hands guns over to spics and niggers while I gotta go through a waiting period"

And so forth. As the clerk went over his form, he informed this bigot that there were a couple of errors that needed correction, to which he replied "Why can't they figure that out themselves? Goddam liberal faggot state." I had been quietly biting my tongue to that point, but at this last comment he had finally managed to express every form of bigotry available. I turned from my paperwork and simply stated

"You need to shut up."

And returned to my paperwork. The clerk looked relieved. The man muttered something about as intelligent as "I say what I want" but didn't say any more. The clerk eventually found grounds to refuse the sale, and everybody won. Except for the asshole, which is fairly important to the point I will be making later.

The last incident was only a week later. I was at the Pickathon Music Festival in Oregon with my girlfriend. On the second night of the festival, we were kept from sleep until 4 in the morning by various assorted drunks singing songs, shouting, playing music, and other drunken revelries. Most of these people quieted down when we approached them with certain vital information - namely, that it was extremely late, they were in a public space, and many people had small children - save, of course, for one special person named Ronnie.

After figuring that the desires of the sleepy were being respected, my girlfriend and I had nearly drifted off into unconsciousness when we were jarred by the clumsy crashing through the woods of a boistrous drunk who loudly informed his travelling partner at one point that he had lost his sandal. My girlfriend sat up in the tent and shouted out to the forest "It's four in the god-damned morning!", tired of handling the issue diplomatically. The drunk in the forest yelled back "Fuck you, bitch!" and I had to get involved. Hoping a threat would suffice, I yelled "Do I have to come out there and kick your ass?", I recieved the reply "You'd have to find me first!"

At this point I was in no mood to let anything slide. I pulled on some pants, tossed a knife in my pocket, grabbed a high-powered flashlight and set out on the trail, following the giggling and crunching noises of our disrespectful neighbor. It was less than a minute before I spotted him, and upon that event, I spotlighted his face and ran up to his position with such alacrity that he fell over. I spent the next five minutes berating him and returned to my tent. We didn't get any more trouble.

These encounters all have a few things in common:
1. I was the aggressor
2. I was provoked by some remarkable examples of poor social judgement and a marked lack of concern for those in the vicinity - in a word, rudeness
3. None of them degraded to physical violence, even though the threat of it was omnipresent
4. There was an immediate improvement in the demeanor of the subject or the tension in the situation.

I am not one of those alarmists who will say that the death of our culture is imminent, that the Day of Judgement is at hand because "kids these days have no respect", but I will put rudeness forward as a social problem of no small concern. My ideas as to its source, or the cause of its apparent increase, or even whether or not it is increasing, are fodder for other posts. The point of this post is to advocate an active approach to, ah, hm, shall we call it attitude correction?

What seems to me the most telling of the constants is the immediate improvement. Obviously, it wasn't all handshakes and "Good day to you, Sirs", but in all cases the subjects did not fail to immediately cease their offensive activity. It may have been accompanied by brooding, mumbled threats, and glowering, but there was no escalation or later revenge. The body language, coupled with this immediate reaction, expresses to me a knowledge that these people knew, on some level, that what they were doing was not appropriate. This further means that there was, at some level, an intention to be offensive.

To skip several premises and get to the conclusion, these people were out to see what they could get away with.

This leads us directly to the root of the problem. It is not necessarily that there are people who willfully and belligerently approach the bounds of what is socially acceptable. In some ways, some contexts, to some degrees, this serves many valuable functions. It forces the rest of us to keep a little perspective on the world around us - a polite way of saying it stops us from being too damn thin-skinned - and it is the essence of social expansion, exploration, and experimentation. But there are times when the object is clearly not growth oriented, but malicious and destructive.

It is in these cases that so often the rest of us find ourselves looking uncomfortably around at eachother, grimacing and shrugging that "Someone" should take care of that. The root problem to which I alluded is that increasingly few people are willing to take up the cause of enforcing good manners. It is obvious why: What could be more rude than calling out a complete stranger on their behavior, in public? This violates several taboos. It is invasive, it causes them to lose face, it creates a scene, and it risks violence. Breaking taboos often increases the discomfort for those around you before it alleviates it.

For these reasons, people are afraid to pursue their own comfort. And for these reasons, people without empathy, restraint, or class are welcome to take control of everyone's quality of life. I'd bet good money that these are generally the same people who draw penises in bathroom stalls, like the Raiders, don't let people change lanes in front of them on the freeway, and think unlicensed Calvin window stickers are clever. But for now that's just a theory.

If I will be bound to stating outright what my point is, it is this: Sometimes you gotta bitch-slap a motherfucker. It does absolutely no good to passively accept discomfort, only to complain about it later in hushed tones. There are three solutions to all problems, and in those instances where they cannot be ignored or avoided, ask yourself, "Should someone do something about this?" and remember that someone includes you. It's everyone's public - that means that it's not just you in it, as well. If we all contribute to maintaining the standards of a polite society, it's concievable that we might actually have one.

Until then, I leave you with (and we abondon eachother to) this: