A lot has changed over the past 53 years. As much as I hate to admit it, I am growing older. Although I don’t think that I am yet considered to be a “senior” citizen – I don’t get the discount - I am certain that I have reached middle age. And if I may say so, it is something that I endure only while kicking and screaming. I love my Dad very much and I miss him deeply; he died a handful of years ago. However, I am not thrilled with the frequent realization that I am becoming my Dad. I remember how he used to speak about the culture of the 60’s and 70’s. He wasn’t well pleased with it, and he didn’t hide his feelings. I now find myself not altogether liking the culture around me, and like my father, I sometimes don’t hide my displeasure very well.
Like so many of my peers, I struggle to understand the dramatic changes occurring around me. The ground of my personal values shake beneath me as if being moved by some uncontrollable seismic activity. The personal etiquette that shaped my behavior four decades ago seems as outdated and rediculous as wrapping a bologna sandwich in waxed paper. I remember my Mother insisting that I read Emily Post’s Book of Etiquette. Contained therein were the rules for proper behavior; everything from table manners to how treat a young girl on a date. How to use a telephone… how to address your elders…. It was all there.
Yet there was something more that steered our lives. I realize now that there was a set of guidelines that defined the boundaries for us all. Likewise, I now also know that many of those rules were in fact rooted in the book of etiquette of the Christian faith: the Bible. Many directly sprang from the well of Solomon’s Proverbs. However, somewhere in the mix of these written truths, an unwritten set of rules, which might not have had specific chapter and verse references in the Bible, seemed to exist. The roots of truth and wisdom contained within these rules could be found therein by anyone who took the time to look, and every young boy knew that if you got outside of those boundaries you would end up in the ditch.
The Book of Etiquette has had to be updated and revised. And just as you cannot legislate morality, neither does it seem reasonable to believe that a book of rules for everyday behavior would be able to stem the tide of societal craziness that sweeps over us at an ever increasing rate. However, it seems to me that the loss of the ability of written rules to help us is not the problem. We have policy manuals for just about everything. We have ordinances and laws to cover any conceivable situation. Certainly, the Bible is still being printed and distributed. Yet with all of these written rules and guidelines, craziness still seems to trump common sense. It is, I believe, the nearly complete disappearance of the former unwritten code that has been our undoing. In that unwritten code were a handful of virtues by which nearly everyone lived their lives. It didn’t matter if they had or had not read The Book of Etiquette, people collectively lived their lives under the steerage of an unseen Captain; ruled by both the colloquial proverbs and wisdom passed from one generation to the next, as well as the many bits of behavioral sensibilities derived from the Scriptures.
I believe that there is today a new unwritten set of rules, one which bears absolutely no similarity to the old. I believe the very definitions of decency and manners have been rewritten. Yet, when I speak of decency, I am not at all referring to the way we dress or the movies we see. I am not referring to a thousand other manners and customs of life today. I realize that the world changes. However, there is something lost. There is a mysterious “something” that has been neither stolen nor misplaced; it quite simply never made the jump from one generation to the next.
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