QOTD - Miss Manners

[jenk]

I found this to be a good reminder...writing on surveys showing that people are rude everywhere:

What bothers [Miss Manners] is that encouraging people to condemn the rudeness of others relieves them of responsibility for the state of things. It's all those awful people out there who are making life so unpleasant for us. Tsk, tsk.

Miss Manners would like to add some questions to that survey:

How much leeway do you allow yourself to disobey etiquette rules because you are in a hurry or have work to do or are upset about something else?

When you encounter rudeness, do you feel justified in retaliating in kind?

Are you willing to contribute to a more polite society by forgoing behavior that others find offensive?

Personally I would change the "forgoing behavior that others find offensive" to "forgoing the pleasure of treating others rudely". And it can be a pleasure to let oneself be Queen of one's little universe...at least, until you discover that the Queen is rather solitary, as the subjects all run off to form their own little Queendoms.