coarsening the culture

File:NMBarScene.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

It’s safer if you stay on the ground.

Fly the friendly skies! It only gets dodgy after the airplane takes off.

Some 200 passengers on a Ryanair flight to London had their trip cut off 30 minutes in, when the pilot had to make an emergency landing in Morocco. Why did he have to do that? Because “a brawl” had broken out among the passengers (https://nypost.com/2024/07/08/world-news/ryanair-passengers-erupt-into-brawl-at-30000-feet-in-the-air-during-flight-from-morocco-to-london/). The New York Post story has all the details.

The point is, there they are, 30,000 feet up in the air, having a barroom brawl aboard the airliner. Gee, what if it spread to the cockpit? No wonder the pilot opted to land as soon as possible. Arrests were made.

What’s with our culture–huh? I remember when airline travel was seen as rather glamorous (Grandma and Grandpa used to fly to Florida every year)… and now it’s for thugs who have a screw loose?

Betcha they’ve had brawls aboard cruise ships, too. But I’m too tired to look it up just now.

There are more important things than this to write about, but I may be the only one writing about it, so here goes.

In my neighborhood there are individuals who walk their dogs not along the sidewalk, but back and forth on other people’s property without the property owners’ permission. There’s one next door who walks her dog around our apartment and onto the adjacent property. She never uses the public sidewalk.

Where did they get this idea? “I think I’ll walk my dog around my neighbor’s yard.” Is this done on some hit TV show I never heard of?

Not to be confused with that other custom of scooping the dog’s poop into the bag and leaving the bag dangling from a bush or just lying on the ground–although our neighborhood also boasts a few practitioners of that peculiar art–I’m not satisfied in my mind that these uninvited guests trouble themselves to clean up after their dogs.

But where did this notion come from? At least one very loud fight has broken out about this, hereabouts, and there are bound to be more. The dog-walker, confronted by the property owner, seemed dumbfounded that the man would question his right to do this.

We coarsen our culture, day in, day out. And there will be a price to pay for it. God’s commandment to love thy neighbor as thyself enables people to live together without being stirred up to cut one another’s throats. Replacing it with stone-headed narcissism will not turn out well for us.