Strong society is built on having good manners

Life today has become all about speed, about ourselves, about completely forgetting that there are, everywhere, others around us, others in this modern society that we live in, one that, if you blink, you miss the rate of change faster than a flash of lightning.

And so to manners. Manners are something that we take for granted. Brought up, as we were, as children, as box-fresh human beings wide-eyed at the growing world, manners were, like the foundations of a house, a requirement.

But, just like a house, without manners underpinning society, the building will start to crumble, not obviously at first, but bit by bit, until, eventually, it’s torn and broken and irretrievably shattered.

Take Chipping Sodbury, for instance. Over there, on Horse Street, residents are complaining that, since the start of the Waitrose supermarket development, parking has intensified on their roads.

Not only that, but cars have been parked in front of residents’ driveways, blocking them in, making access impossible.

Now, the immediate reaction here is to blame Waitrose. The development has shaken everything up, creating chaos where there was calm in terms of where people deposit their cars. But Waitrose is not to blame.

The people blocking the driveways are to blame, and all down to one thing: lack of manners.

If these drivers had manners, they wouldn’t dream of blocking someone’s driveway. Yes, they may be in a rush, yes, there may be limited parking spaces, but they have to have some manners, some mechanism in themselves that stops and ask, ‘Would I like someone to block my drive so I couldn’t get out?’ to which the answer would be ‘no’. So why, therefore, do they do it?

In this society of ‘me first’ there has to be some moment where we pause and ask if we are acting as we should, if we are planning, preparing enough.

Because if we don’t, if we carry on blocking driveways or not teaching our kids move over to let others past, or, as with our local school, parking on yellow hazard lines that are actually there to protect our children, then the foundations that we live on will begin to crack.

And before we know it, society has crumpled into a heap around us and we are left picking up the pieces.

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