Where Are Your Manners?

We all possess the same emotions and have experienced these emotions since the beginning of time – anger, joy, frustration, etc. It may be fair to say that of all our emotions, throughout the millennia, fear has been the most prevalent.

FDR once told Americans, “All we have to fear is fear itself.” Americans seem to have taken his words the wrong way. “Fear” is perhaps the driving force behind Americans’ obsession with guns. Yet, we fear nothing so much as we fear guns in the hands of fellow Americans. What are we doing?

 

In the wake of the school shooting in Nashville, where three nine-year-olds were murdered, along with three adults, I thought about our manners. Japan has a virtual gun-free society, and by that token, know nothing of the 40,000-plus gun deaths gun-happy America suffers annually. They also have good manners, something upon which America has lost its grip.

 

Good manners are a simple proposition, but absolutely essential to a peaceful society. We take for granted the good manners of the Japanese people – imagine it being ingrained into their national psyche, and thus easily achieved. Then, what is ingrained in ours – aggression, violence, vanity? We certainly do not make a big deal out of manners – not in our communities, perhaps neither in our homes. Then, where do we expect our children to learn that essential nature? The history books?

 

The Japanese have found – perhaps knew all along – that they do not need guns, having learned early on that the best defense against ill-mannered people is forbearance and a dose of humility. Having guns, rather than alleviating our fears, probably exacerbates them. We are much more likely to grow monsters in a subconscious effort to justify our guns, and then upgrade to more lethal weapons as our self-importance grows.

 

Guns have one purpose: to kill. We need one another much more than we need one another dead. Bad manners stand in our way. They are the spawning grounds from which springs the violence, rape, theft, and other such manifestations we fear most. How deeply endemic is this malignancy in America? Can we reverse it? Perhaps we have gone too far – dug a hole so deep we could not heave our guns out if we wanted to.

 

There will be many more shootings in America because that is where the guns are, and guns have a stupid way of making people and their manners obsolete. They have a gravity about them – a gravity all of their own, And, as our fingers steadily gravitate toward these guns, we become Tolkien’s Golem, and they become our “Precious.”