Rowdy fans, rude customers, fliers out of control — Americans must learn how to be ruly again
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Hey. HEY. Get over here and listen up, knuckleheads. Every time I pick up The Post, I’m shocked at how discourteous everyone has gotten. Have we all forgotten how to behave towards our fellow man? I haven’t observed so much contemptuous behavior since the last time I talked to a French waiter.
Let’s pause to roll back our memories to eight weeks ago, and how we pictured our post-pandemic summer. We were all going to come blinking out of our caves, hold hands and break out a couple of choruses of “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” together.
Instead, you’re acting rude, lewd and full of ’tude. Yankees fans are behaving like rabid wolverines raised by French waiters, complaints about disruptive behavior on flights are up 500 percent over 2019 levels and a guy punched out a horse in Central Park.
“It’s really coming to the point where we have to defend ourselves,” said a spokesman for the Association of Professional Flight Attendants, raising the dark specter of a scary new world of pissed-off flight attendants. To fight back against the next dingbat who gets out of line (like a woman on a flight to North Carolina who bit a crew member and tried to open the cabin door), the nation’s flight attendants are secretly training like ninjas, learning the dark arts of the double-ear slap, the eyeball poke and the crotch kick. Well, maybe not ninjas, but at least unusually menacing Three Stooges.
Up in Chowderland, people are being wicked mean to restaurant workers. A place called Apt Cape Cod in Massachusetts gave its customers a timeout by closing its doors for a day after one too many incidents of obnoxious behavior.
“I hope you get hit by a car,” someone told a staffer after expecting to be served after closing hour. The restaurant reopened with this sign posted at the door: “If you cannot be kind, you cannot dine.”
This is how dire things have gotten: In May, both American and Southwest Airlines temporarily suspended alcohol purchases in their main cabins. Hello? Haven’t we all suffered enough already? Bud, your right not to wear a mask ends at the point where I might have to get through a flight without a Bud. Just follow whatever the policies are, even if they’re stupid. Their flying tube, their rules. The FAA can fine you thousands of dollars for not playing along. If you don’t like it, get a jetpack or take the interstate.
The bigger problem is we all need to re-learn the fine art of human interaction.
Don’t get me wrong, I love to see headlines like “Yankees Fan Destroyed by Security After Running on Field” (destroying one Yankee fan is what I call an excellent start). But even people who pride themselves on rudeness (such as Yankees fans, who also threw a ball at Red Sox outfielder Alex Verdugo and spat on the 9-year-old daughter of Red Sox coach Jason Varitek) have to stop acting like they’ve been raised by wolves when all that happened is that we’ve all been temporarily raised by Netflix.
Things could have been pretty crazy the last time we went through the Twenties — a century ago, we had just been through a world war, a pandemic had killed off 675,000 in a nation of 100 million and the era’s equivalent of Bernie Sanders was cooling his heels in prison for opposing the war. But we shook all that off and returned to normalcy, mainly because there were no viral clips that doubled as instructional videos for how to behave badly.
I don’t want to read anything more about unruly passengers, unruly diners or unruly Yankees fans (unless they get publicly tased, I always want to read that).
We used to be ruly, America! We can learn to be ruly again.
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