Saints and Sinners: Politeness can go a long way
Two women are walking down the street in the tree-lined suburb when a man passes them going the other way.
“Good evening, ladies,” he says, doffing his hat.
The women look at each other, startled.
“Must be the minister,” says one. The other nods as they continue on their way.
Saying hello to a fellow passerby when out for a stroll used to be a common occurrence. You would never think of passing somebody on the sidewalk without saying, “How d’ do.” (That was 1930s talk.)
If you saw other people sprinkling the lawn or sitting on the porch swing, you would exchange friendly greetings. It wasn’t only the minister who said “hello”.
These days, we consider ourselves lucky if the strangers don’t accost us — or worse.
A woman from Joplin, Mo., who reads this column in the Joplin Globe recently asked for my thoughts on the best thing to come out of the Sept. 11 tragedy in New York — and the worst thing. She wanted to incorporate my remarks in a speech she was to give.
I replied the best thing to come out of Sept. 11 was it brought the country together. Strangers talked to one another.
“We needed that,” I said, “following a long period when it was ‘everybody for himself’ in the country. Sept. 11 brought the promise of a nation pulling together — ‘all for one and one for all.’ The bad part was that this moment of togetherness didn’t last. The candle went out too soon.”
A survey taken four short months after Sept. 11 shows that a lack of respect and common courtesy is once again a serious problem in the United States. One community in Ohio tried to restore good, old-fashioned neighborliness this past spring by holding a “Hi, Neighbor Night.”
Residents on the odd-numbered side of the street were to sit out front. Those on the other side were to come over and say hello. One resident put up a makeshift drink stand on the front lawn so that those who came over could share a cold drink.
Only two people showed up. The streets were deserted.
Anybody remember Herb Shriner? People who watched his program on television 20 years ago loved him for his down-home-in-Indiana naivete. Like the time he told his audience not to sit too close to their TV screens because he had a cold.
There were lots of reasons to love Herb Shriner. But I loved him most because he was a neighborly man in a world that desperately needed neighborliness. He always said hello to people. I don’t mean just to people he knew. Everybody does that. I mean to people he didn’t know.
There was the time he walked up to the box-office of a Broadway theater in New York.
“Hello,” said Herb in his neighborly Hoosier drawl to the man behind the ticket window.
“What?” asked the man crossly.
Herb grinned back to assure him he meant no harm by the remark. “Hello,” he said again. “It’s just a little expression we use in Indiana when we meet someone.”
Some people will say it’s “simplistic” (that’s the word we use today when we want to put down somebody else’s ideas) to suggest that all the problems of the world will go away if we just start saying hello to one another.
I’m not saying our problems will go away, but they might be a little easier to live with if we were more neighborly.
Nasal decongestants don’t claim to cure a cold but, the commercials say, they can make you forget you have a cold for a while. What this world may need is more people willing to be nasal decongestants and fewer laboratory geniuses (read “columnists, TV commentators and other experts”) who keep telling us they have a cure for whatever it is we’ve got.
(George Plagenz is a syndicated columnist.)