Do Manners Matter?

Peggy Noonan has a follow-up op-ed piece on her epic saga at West Palm Beach International Airport she recounted last week.

I guess that Peggy herself can serve as a definition the word "classy," as in "classy lady," a term that is withering from disuse and abuse by the new barbarians who have taken over the groves of academe and the media.

The absence of what used to be called "common courtesy" is striking here in South Florida, filled with refugees from the Northeast where civil behavior has become rare or south of the border where in some places it has barely ever existed.

Peggy has a few examples of how the twisted obsessions of berserk social engineers have entered even a Catholic environment. The wreckers of values on the left believe that insulting the beliefs of believers is not rude or even impolitic, but the exercise of a so-called civic right.

"Work is the curse of the drinking classes" has now been replaced by "Rudeness is the right of working classes," or at least those at the TSA with a cushy government job and benefits to match. Yes, patting down people all day long is not exactly enjoyable, but what gives an employee the "right" to treat respectable citizens on an airline trip like guilty criminals until proven innocent by electronic wand?

There is a hilarious and grungy subscript to this whole West Palm Beach Airport turkey-shoot.

Scripps Institute recently decided to move to South Florida from its San Diego HQ. The final choice boiled down to Jupiter, FL in northern Palm Beach County and Boca Raton at its southern end.

The northern venue of Jupiter was chosen by the Palm Beach County Commissioners for a number of reasons, but one was reportedly that if Scripps were located in Boca Raton, many of the visitors to the Institute would fly into Boca via the much more commodious [and better behaved, from my limited experience] Ft. Lauderdale Airport.

Therefore, count on West Palm Beach Int'l getting even more crowded [and impolite, verging on insulting] in the future!

The worst is yet to come!