Good manners are more important than good laws.
A thousand ideas are screaming in my head at this moment. There is a thread covering economics and full employment of the adult population. When people work 40 or more hours a week, they don’t have much time and energy for other things like, self government. Practicing good manners takes time, and we assume there isn’t enough of it to practice good manners.
I want to communicate with everyone who represents me in government and none of them have time to discuss anything that is important to me with me, so how can they represent me? They can not!
When the state held my grandchildren in foster care, I desperately wanted to speak with the bureaucrats making the decisions, and they used a privacy law to prevent communication. This completely destroys personal power and liberty. Because grandparents united, we were able to get the laws radically changed, and I have the satisfaction of knowing those who preventing discussing my grandchildren with me, know they were wrong. But they do not know how wrong. They do not understand what good manners would have done to correcting a terrible injustice that seriously hurt my grandchildern.
When someone was willing to pay $2000 to resolve a debt I owed, there was no one in the bureacracy in charge of that debt, with whom to speak, so the debt was not resolved, and we all took a big loss. The mobil home that was a source of property tax revenue was destroyed, because it had to be moved, and could not be moved until the property taxes were paid. I used a screw driver and hammer to dismantle it and hauled it away in a trash bin. So much for not having a means to communicate with someone has the ability to make discisions.
Our young think we are being modern and effecient, and don’t have a glue what good manners has to do with our personal power and liberty and making things work for the better for everyone. This is sad, because our liberty is so destroyed at this point, it is stupid for us to send our young into war to defend it. Saddam may have been a tyrant, but there is no way Iraqis were as regulated and powerless under the pressures of bureaucracy as we are. Only because our young can not contrast their experience with the past, can they still believe we have the liberty and personal power that our democracy is suppose to be all about.
I write for a newspaper that once had an editor who replied to every letter I sent, telling me of changes I needed to make to be printed. Thanks to her my skills improved and I have been published often. However, the editor who replaced her, doesn’t have time to reply and doesn’t have a clue what good manners would do to empower the people and develop strong ties with the paper. I never know if what I submitted was accepted or not, and if not, why it was not accepted. I have been disenfranchised. How much should we care that newspapers are loosing their readers and may go belly up, when they are the ones who broke the relationship?
We are destroying our country, because we no longer understanding the value of good manners. We are no longer the nation of hope we once were.