There were 19-posts waiting for approval in the comment section of UrbanSurvival when I took an hour break to grab a bite of something to eat and go out to the mailbox and back.
Of 19, only a couple were responsive to a post on my site. The rest, being driven by someone’s return from a promised departure, dealt with Trump this, Trump that. Most was negative although a few people who see the paid whores on the Hill are the real problem got a few good licks in, too.
In the end, they were all blown to click-dust as my laser-phasor zapped ’em all to Kingdome come…but friend, it’s a symptom of a much, much bigger problem.
(Continues below)
Manners have imploded in terminal America.
People are rude on the freeway, people are rude in the supermarket, folks are rude at sporting events, people are rude at the gas station, and people are rude to one-another in personal relationships. WTF?
This isn’t something I’m “making up” or just being a grumpy old man blowing smoke because of a generation of (here let me speak like them) rude pricks.
Google Trends reveals interest in the search terms [manners] is only running 40% of what it ran a short 13-years ago.
If you’re math-challenged: That’s 40% “house-broken” and 60% “stay out of our lives.”
What amazes me is that not everyone has fallen into the trap. In this old man’s view Rappin-4-tay calls out black-on-black violence (video for the un-hip here) better than BLM.
“Life ain’t based on peaches and cream
This new generation lost a whole lot of dreams
Future doctors, producers, and mothers
The list goes on but now we killin’ our brothers
And if we killin’ our brothers that means we killin’ our own kind
These kids is watchin’ now it goes to their mind
Rattatatat cause you got a gat
Then they want a gat you livin’ like that..”
Street manners seems a totally hip thing to understand, but which fork is for dessert and which for the salad?
A quick check of Alexa (I yelled at my monitor for 45-minutes before figuring out Jeff Bezo’s has a split-personality product line, lol) and you can see that EmilyPost.com has dropped from around 80,000 in worldwide rankings down to 175,000. And that’s just in the past year.
What the hell is going on?
Digital Madness
If you are not coupled – and only live from “hook-up to hook-up” (screw-to-screw if you’re over 40) then who needs manners?
Human relations, sadly, have become just another commodity. Yep: What we used to call Dates are now walking Disposables. Divorce lawyers, I reckon, were part of the product development team.
Remember: EmilyPost.com: 175,000 is their ranking. The smaller the number, the more peeps, got it?
Tinder.com had an Alexa.com global rank yesterday of 19,850 – and it was the 943rd highest ranking site in Brazil if that matters. Keep it in mind next time you’re in Rio, though.
Another “catch and recycle” site – PentyofFish.com ranked yesterday a bit lower than Tinder – 21,648 in the USA – but again, keeping in mind that the rankings are semi-parabolic, we would have to guess that DISPOSABLE RELATIONS have become the new “normal.”
Along with that, the domination of slovenly clothing is about total, too. What passes for fashion in the recreational setting is early-Goodwill.
Elaine and I are happy as ever…bonded by 17.7 years of marriage. The disappearance of other acceptable humans doesn’t hurt, though.
Drop by the local stores (even here in the Outback) and (as Elaine commented recently after shopping): The women under 40 mostly look like they’ve dressed to go hooking while the men are looking a lot like…pimps.
At first, I was skeptical. Then I thought back to the two truck drivers who brought out our replacement treadmill from Dallas recently.
They were wearing more gold than we own. It was amazing…probably plated…but still my late friend Louis (a real smack peddling pimp I knew for years in school and as a reporter – he had the dirt on everyone) would have been proud to have that much bling – out of pawn.
So let’s see if we can line up the symptoms:
Music that promotes a less than intellectual, laid-back lifestyle. R4T is an exception.
Manners are on their way out of town. The door may have slapped someone on the ass, which would explain the current fascination with high cholesterol butts.
Fashion… And if it looks like a hooker or pimp, it’s just another employee dressing up for…gulp…WORK!
Our only Urban Survival advice is if you’re looking for a long-term relationship, you should skip past the half-way wannabe’s.
If you’re a woman of a certain age, go looking for a real pimp who’s getting on toward retirement and wants out of the game alive. See if you can “gentle” one. More rewarding than “breaking a horse?” Get back to us.
Or, if you’re a guy, go look for a hooker without her own retirement plan who wants a new kind of life. Check for needle marks and run HIV testing, of course.
And for those whose preference is indistinct, one from Column A, one from Column B. Just hope the one Column A doesn’t run off with Column B – that does happen, too, these days.
It would be ill-mannered of us to point out that the world is crazy. We’ll stay politically correct and call it adaptationally-challenged.
To those still looking for the love of their life, the hope we can offer is that Canadian Geese manage to mate for life.
Yet the website www.canadiangeese.com doesn’t seem to have a damn thing to do with quality mating. Sells feathery things.
So back to the basic sales funnel.
- Prospect
- Qualify
- Demonstrate
- Overcome Objections (or common sense)
- And Close (the I Do moment)
You need to focus on lead flow, lead flow, lead flow. That means all the “adult papers” along with Craigslist, Tinder, PlentyofFish, and attending events your target mate might be interested in. Plays, fine dining, the list goes on and on.
One other strategy that occurs to us it to “get religion” for a while and try on some of the church-sponsored dating sites.
Or just go to the grocery store around 5:30 in the afternoon. Maybe you’ll get lucky and find a ready to retire pimp or hooker.
You’ll be in luck if they’re really shopping for someone with manners. Check aisle 5.
(If you don’t have a good opening line, trying something that will reveal their mental agility. Like: “Excuse me, I’m new around here; what aisle are Access files on?” (Or seaweed, transmission fluid, or spreadsheets, or…)
Maybe you can convince them – as a Canadian Goose in training – that there’s a life after the egg-layer times are done.
You’ll know the End of Days is close-by when the world’s first Senior-Oriented Sex Robots come out. SOSR’s for short.
They will not only look like young hotties (you pick which sex) but they will say “Not tonight, dear,” “Did you take your pills?” and they will have a built-in thermometer, blood pressure cuff, defibrillator plus be able to drive. When they’re not picking up after you.
This, brothers and sisters, is the Future. Maybe you don’t need to wear out a perfectly good member of the opposite sex on it. But do bring your own batteries…
RSS Issues
Did I say something bad about Google? I don’t think so, but regardless, our Google.com/Feedburner RSS feed is down until we can sort through that snake pit.
If I can’t get it fixed in a reasonable time (besides being pissed!) I will come up with a new delivery system.
Meantime, our direct feed is found at
https://urbansurvival.com/feed/ for those suffering withdrawal or frustration.
If you have any ideas on the “file too large” error when there are only a handful of items in the Feed, let me know?
Write when you get rich,
George@ure.net
Hi George>
Maybe the conjecture about the Solar System passing through an energetic area of space that causes human to go weird is true.
It appears that Spirit can influence electronic devises such as digital voice recorder, field strength meters et al. If so them maybe forms of energy yet to be discovered can mess with humans at our Spirit level. All this just conjecture and way too much watching “Ghost Adventures”!
The weekend draws near, yea!!
George,
I and my wife(of50yrs) agree with you 100%. We have all been segmented and divided and are much easier to control.
George, I’ve met so many people lately that have said how tired they are of people.
The other phenomenon is I’ve noticed more people with body odor in the past year, than I can ever recall. I wonder if there’s some new trend of going au-natural or if the new cultures, that are growing in numbers, have just brought their ways with them? I’ve heard that BO is common in Europe and the middle east. I hope this new trend doesn’t catch on. It’s not a pleasant smell. Hope people put deodorant on their prepper list.
In the city I live in, the most prevalent smells are exhaled marijuana, usually from the car in front of me, and coffee roasters. Both make up many of the new businesses in Oregon. So, I guess society is becoming either stoned or buzzed as part of the new business opportunities this new economy is enabling.
Oh yeah, did I mention there’s also lots of brewery’s and distillers in that venue of new business models. Does that say something about the mindset of our overall culture?
If some adversary ever invaded us, would we as a society be too under the influence to even notice and is that maybe the plan?
Kinda hard to monetize…lemme see…NOTHING. Lewd, lascivious, drunken? Oh hell yeah…monetizes for decades.
Slather my body with Chinese lead….prefer strawberry…or coconut oil…
Good rant and something we (friends & family) have discussed for some time. Thankfully, ALL of my grandchildren still say “yes sir/mam” and so on. Respect, being polite and grateful for what we have is disappearing. To help things out just smile, be polite. It helps. Thanks for the “thinking” inputs!
I do not see this hostility as I go about my day to day activities. Sure things are more crowded & busy, but most people are polite – both workers & shoppers. Also, your negative senior sex rant targets men. If you lived in a city, you would see most senior women are just as horny as the men.
George –
What you call manners is one aspect of what I call personal accountability, or lack there of.
First off, I wouldn’t have called ‘the ignoring of the “ground rules” for your special subscriber posts, manners – rather people who didn’t keep to the topic, broke the basic ‘set up’ for posting.
Secondly, not that long ago I was reacting to something that had happened personally, when I realized that ‘the basic problem’ – that the PTB crowd had forgotten or deliberately ‘broken’ the tenants that guided ‘behavior between people as early (that I noticed) in the early seventies. This is possibly concurrent with the gutting of the ratio of workers pay with that of ‘bosses’. (If one’s pay is low enough that one is always, no matter how frugal you are, in debt – then you will feel little compunction to be responsible.)
Finally, so as to not make this a ‘major paper’ – once upon a time, people looked up to ‘the president’ as not only the physical leader of the country, but also as ‘moral leader’ – Can you honestly say this now? (When I was very young, I thought Eisenhower was ‘president of the world’ – steady, thoughtful, grandfatherly – a good man – now my thoughts are censored about the current occupant of the White House.)
No, sir – the real term is personal accountability!
Sorry, I meant tenents, or something like that . . .
I live at the buckle of the Bible belt and do not see what you describe. People here are very friendly and polite. Men open doors for me all the time. Rudeness is frowned upon. People do dress very casual, but the hooker/pimp style you describe is rarely seen here by me. But then, I don’t go to shopping malls or the “wrong side of the tracks”.
We have a unique position of having 2 living places, 1 in town for business & 1 outside a small town for future retirement. We still marvel how totally different the places are with manners leading the differences.
Another Bible Belt dweller here and I find no problem with manners, ‘race relations’ ( thought we were all humans), etc. men hold doors for women, kids hold doors for elders, people say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, etc. People will buy coffee for police officers and those in uniform. Rush hour has gotten worse. Now pushing 20 minutes. Why just the other day there were 6 cars ahead of me at a stop light!
George, they have an Alexa for Seniors. It’s pretty funny. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvT_gqs5ETk
Periodically I sit back and try to make sense of where our society is from a long term historical perspective. Universities are no longer sites of open discourse, science is filtered through political correctness and agendas, myth is embraced over reason, people are increasing crude, we are increasingly more tribal due to identify politics, a large part of the population lives paycheck to paycheck in a modern form of serfdom, there’s a growing gulf between the haves and have-nots, the wealthy protect themselves with walls and guards, order is in decline, etc. As much as we would like to view ourselves as a knowledgeable and enlightened society I conclude the opposite is true. Despite all our technological wonders we are in the New Dark Age. Difficult to accept but it appears to be the only conclusion that makes sense. Looking forward to the New Renaissance.
absolutely accurate
and George, rare form on the manners. Or maybe I just identify with you 100%. great discourse.
Well, let’s think about it, in my lifetime, we’ve witnessed our own government LIE about Oswald being the lone killer of John Kennedy. Watched the take down and out of Malcolm X, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King. Watched us being lied to about Vietnam, WWII, 911, and many other false flags including Oklahoma and Waco, etc. We’ve watched corrupted politicians get away with murder. We’ve watched our government sell us out and impoverish us. We’ve watched political correctness and multi-culturalism and globalist agenda’s abuse and steal from the middle classes and do a literal 35 year halt to wage increases in the lower rungs. We’ve watched our country import the poor to compete with our poor and put the cost on the taxpayers while taking away from the citizens. We just watched the biggest destruction of our healthcare system when a tweak would have done it, but in the interest of everything is a business model, we got sold out, yet again. Haven’t you heard how the liberals took over education to dumb us down, the media, hollyweird, the banks, etc., and have a vice grip on our nation’s heartbeat? They have ruptured what worked and inflamed the beast in everyone via violence, porn, gender bending, and all manner of confusion and oft repeated lies. Not only are universities not the sites of open discourse you cannot even DEBATE an issue; it is all one sided, and if you ain’t on the pc correct side, watch out! You can get beat up or killed for your opinion. Our history is not taught any more, but we can sure target it for destruction and just seeing something can be so offensive it has to be destroyed, we can’t ignore anything anymore. We can’t take the high road, everything is a problem to someone else. NO TOLERANCE just dissonance. People are copy cats, they copy the smut, the piggishness and the trash from the tv shows and movies, look to the filth in the movies. The standards are gone, who is holding them up? Half the kids don’t have both parents raising them. The country is being convinced a Father/Dad/Man isn’t needed in the home, not as a provider, not as a protector, not as an example. So, what does anyone expect? I find it quite sad that it has become so easy to destroy not only the family, but all the foundations of our society. I try to be reasonable and remember that it only took 300 Bolsheviks to destroy Czarist Russia. It is a wonder that America has stood so long against so much corruption.
On another note: One of Elvis Presley’s karate instructor’s said that the only six phrases anyone needs to learn to make it in the world are: Yes/No Ma’am, Yes/No Sir, and Please and Thank you. He said that is the manners that Elvis was raised with.
what you just said needs to be put on a monument it needs to be put into every Courthouse it needs to be put into every school it needs to be put into every Mall it needs to be put into everyhome and I’m sure there’s hundreds of other places that it needs to be put at to remind us who we were not what we are because to become what we were we have to change Who We Are will we not
Raised by mid-western parents and grandparents, I was taught to always say sir or ma’am. Now that I’m 69 I still do, but it is sometimes awkward when the “ma’am” is 40 years younger.
BTW, I would be interested in knowing what you would consider the defining characteristics (software and/or hardware) of a SOSR.
Ma’am is one of those dangerous words that can cause heavy, heavable objects to suddenly be catapulted toward a sensitive area of a speaker’s body. It’s even become questionable here in West Texas what to say in order to request a female’s attention that’s obviously younger than me but well beyond the teenage years. It’s best to assume a proper defensive stance before uttering such former terms of respect.
I notice the intrusion of crudeness and rude people all along the east coast. I see it in the small towns of NH, ME and NC. It’s infiltrated our culture. It’s cool to be crude. It’s cool to act and dress urban. People care less about others.
Fixing it begins with each of us.
I feel badly for educators. How can they teach their students to not be bullies, to not call others names, to help those that need help, to be able to tell fact from fiction, to not tell a lie….to teach their students to make ethical decisions when….
When they took the bible out of everything except the MS approved watered down versions on Sunday tv and cable.
When there is nothing bigger or better than man, that leaves a small person.
Got Galliano? With Harvey on his way in, best to be prepped for a good ‘Wallbanger’, just in case….
ALL sense and civility will soon return with the up and coming FOOTBALL season….GO (your pick)!!!!…..Since we are a seasonal society and without a sports team to trash we the people revert to dissing …each other ( a try at humor)
I think you’re onto something, George. This whole “gender identity” issue is part of it too; sorta reminds me of the “Tower of Babel” in the Bible, and these “gender fluid” idiots can’t figure out what sex they are. But they sure as hell want you to “respect” their confusion.
Most of the time I agree with Mr. Ure and here is why not this time. I’m about a little > twice my son’s age. When we talk about this matter it would appear as though we both live in an entirely different town.
He sees danger were I feel comfortably secure. He encounters rudeness and stupidity whereas people I meet are extremely courteous and polite. It may have more to do with how a person feels that will match his/her experiences?!
Google witches YouTube took a playlist off of my YouTube that was titled Paperclip and had three movies on it and they remove them said they didn’t fit their terms of service so they’re hitting you at the same time so they must not like us talking about such things so they hit you up whatever they can so it sounds like to me cuz I’ve never been hit before on YouTube and I’ve been on there for many years
“Don’t hand me no lines and keep your hands to yourself.”
Seen a whole mess of people fishing on the way to work this evening. Everyone seemed to be getting along just fine. Casting and catching. Just like life, casting and catching.
Ohhgg you know the deal, Emotionally charged hoy words in the data reveal to us a volatile future.
Jusy like All the animals get excited in the forest right before a major earthquake!!
Pay attention George! The data is speaking to you!
:)
Birds navagation system gets all wonkey right before what?
;)
Are we seeing magnetic interference from shift of the poles? Advance warning systems are given by the universe IF we are paying attention!
Could be solar. Just saying.
Pay attention! The woo woo is speaking!
Infinitely NOW!
0
To big to fail simply means that you are too small to save. Once that truly sinks in, when it comes to manners, what’s the point? Watching the culture decline with your dignity intact is pretty meaningless to anybody under 40.
Or as I put it, every village needs a grumpy old man, and some days, it’s me.
Robert: The BO thing is a part of the current “Bohemian” ’60s hippie-revival culture. Deodorant has become optional, as have frequent baths and most other things pertaining to personal hygiene. This is opportunized via “organic” soaps and body oils which cost 3x to 8x as much as their commercial counterparts, and function probably not-as-well (No one can really tell, since when ya spends $8 for a bar of soap, you try not to use it up.) Oh, and it’ll probably be further monetized in the future, by a plethora of OTC snake-oil hepatitis treatments.
Kirk and Sherlyn: Most places, people run about 80% to politeness. The rude ones are nearly all young’uns, with a smattering of priggish 35-55yo men, and haughty 40-80yo women randomly interspersed.
Bill: Being “older,” I usually use “darlin'” or “hon” when addressing women who’re considerably younger than I. Most appreciate (or at least tolerate) the greetings, and I’m wry-natured enough to take a sadistic pleasure in the reaction of those (usually the same “neu feminists” that give me dirty looks for daring to open a door for them) who don’t. Life is too short, and I’ve little patience for thin-skinned or humorless people…
Westcoaster: Respect amongst adults must be earned. I do not respect those who dare _demand_ my consent for their behavior, belief, or opinion. Agree to disagree? Absolutely! Make demands and I get my back up — really quickly — even if I agree with someone in-principal.
OT posts happen on any forum which opens itself to public comment, and are not necessarily undesirable. Troll or flame bait posts are. IMO any post which is designed to elicit emotional responses from other readers, and is not directly related to our gracious host’s column, should be 86’d…