Hi All,

I know all of us here have urgent and pressing and immediate things to tend to, to worry about, that take up much or most of our day, and often leave little time for the leisurely consideration of things like how nice people are, or are not, to one another. I include myself among that group, as my wife nurses a broken foot unlikely to heal anytime soon, I see my orthopod this week about a possible torn rotator cuff (“can you lift boxes weighing 40 lbs or more“ it says on the SSDI questionnaire – “not anymore” I can answer with confidence). And we both struggle though our twelfth year post-dx with PD.

Nevertheless, I have been thinking about precisely that question over the last few weeks, and I wonder if anyone here has an opinion one way or the other. Simply put, do you think that people are becoming more civil, charitable, thoughtful, empathetic – in a word, “nicer” – to one another than they were say ten or twenty or thirty years ago. I am not talking about the more complex social relationships we have with relatives or close friends, or people that for one reason or another we know well. I am talking about how people who are more or less strangers to one another, people we deal with on the phone, at the grocery store or the Walgreen’s, who live down the street or in the neighborhood or across the hall, that you bump into (sometimes literally) at Best Buy or Target. Are these casual and seemingly inconsequential encounters, with nothing at stake except how pleasant or unpleasant the actual social exchange will be at the moment, becoming more pleasant? Are people showing greater “civility,” if you will, to one another?

As you may have figured out, my personal opinion is that they are. I also think these little moments of “civility,” “generosity,” “niceness,” whatever you want to call them (I think of them as instant deep eye-contact moments), occur most often between one individual and another individual. Group encounters tend to change the context from one of possible momentary intimacy and exchange (a real smile, lightness in tone, vulnerability and trust as you get your receipt or make way for another cart in an aisle) into “group” affairs which involve more generalized attitudes toward categories of people and often skew our expectations and therefore the encounter itself.

I used the words “seemingly inconsequential encounters” deliberately, because while each individual moment or encounter as I have described it does nothing more than brighten your day or make a transaction with someone you may never see or talk to again easier or smoother, taken together they make me wonder if there isn’t, underneath all the turmoil of politics and social policy debates, a growing feeling among ordinary folks – even if it’s under their conscious radar - that, as John Lennon said, “I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.” That we recognize that we are together in ways both obvious and mysterious, and that we are the better for it.

Seems like a kind of seasonal question, which is okay, but Tiny Tim aside, does anyone agree, disagree, or have any thoughts along these general lines?

Thanks and Happy Holidays,

Greg

PS - This post was prompted in part by the recent and astonishing report in the New York Times that stranger-to-stranger homicides in NYC are projected to total 35 for all of 2007. In a city of 8 million people. The lowest annual total since they started keeping records in the early '60's.