The story I’m going to tell is about morals. Our society has become one in which people feel licensed to give their selfishness free rein. The most important story about why Americans have become sad and alienated and rude, I believe, is also the simplest: We inhabit a society in which people are no longer trained in how to treat others with kindness and consideration. We’re enmeshed in some sort of emotional, relational, and spiritual crisis, and it undergirds our political dysfunction and the general crisis of our democracy. The words that define our age reek of menace: conspiracy, polarization, mass shootings, trauma, safe spaces. In 2000, two-thirds of American households gave to charity in 2018, fewer than half did. Murder rates have been surging, at least until recently. At the far extreme of meanness, hate crimes rose in 2020 to their highest level in 12 years. A head nurse at a hospital told me that many on her staff are leaving the profession because patients have become so abusive. ![]() Why have Americans become so mean? I was recently talking with a restaurant owner who said that he has to eject a customer from his restaurant for rude or cruel behavior once a week-something that never used to happen. ” It’s a call to re-establish institutions for the moral formation of our citizens. ![]() David Brooks had a 6,500 word article in the September issue of The Atlantic titled “ How America Got Mean.
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