She is a middle-aged grocery clerk, and I have seen her working at Food Lion on Sundays and holidays and late into the evening during the week. Standing at her register, she warmly greets her customers, but she could as easily be receiving tourists at an antebellum mansion on the James River or teaching Arthurian romance to gentlewomen at Sweet Briar. Although I know that she must be tired from the endless hours on her feet, she is always gracious to me as she scans my purchases, and I am inclined to compare her to the young woman, an employee at another store, who, a few weeks ago, wordlessly carted out my groceries. After tossing the plastic bags into the trunk of my car without glancing at me, she skulked away, round shouldered and surly, leaving me standing there smiling stupidly with the dollar bill which was to have been her tip still in my hand. Unlike the sullen bagger, who feels justified in her rude behavior because of her minimum-wage employment, the Food Lion’s grande dame, though destined to work in a discount supermarket, remains the very soul of gentility.

The ladylike cashier is a kindred spirit to Mr. Smith, a backyard mechanic who came to my rescue one snowy Saturday when my car broke down in front of his house. When I knocked on his door asking for help, he was tuning up a truck, but he dropped everything to lend me a hand in spite of the fact that he was scheduled to work the night shift at his regular job. He not only made two trips to town to obtain the right part for my car, but he had to interrupt his labors to make a third trip to pick up his wife and daughter, who were returning from a high school basketball game. While he fixed the car and traveled the slippery roads, I drank coffee and watched television with his son. When Mr. Smith had finished the repairs, I asked him what I owed him. Poor as a church mouse at the time, I felt relief and gratitude when I heard him reply that I could pay for the five-dollar part if I wished and if I had the money, but that otherwise I owed him nothing.

Mr. Smith and the grocery clerk, a black man and a white woman, belong to a small rainbow coalition of courteous, charitable people. Unlike those of us who subscribe to the apotheosis of self, they live in accordance with St. Paul’s greatest virtue, and they know that courtesy is charity made manifest. Most people, excited by charity when it is demonstrated on a large scale or in a dramatic way, seem unaffected by small acts of kindness. And as time goes by, there are fewer and fewer of us capable of the garden variety of charity—fewer and fewer members of Mr. Smith’s and the cashier’s minority group. The more officially and officiously compassionate we become as a nation, the less caring we become as individuals. As we congratulate ourselves for perpetuating the old deal, we harden our hearts to those people we meet face to face on the street everyday. Liberals, attempting to brainwash wasteland literalists, link disagreement with their ideology as a sign of incivility on the part of conservatives. The media have convinced the American public—as if Americans really cared about or practiced civility—that we are tired of the fussing and fighting going on up there on the Hill and wish that those ill-bred Republican so-and-so’s would just get down to nonpartisan business. While there are many causes for our bad manners, the primary cause is materialism, not right-wing political views.

The courteous among us, celebrating human potentiality over materialism, recognize that—as flawed as we are — each of us partakes of the divine perfection of God. But even the nonbeliever who is compelled to loathe others because he adjudges himself the center of the universe must admit that something unfathomable transcends the playing out of his fantastic tricks, and he has only to consider the power of such phenomena as hurricanes or F-5 twisters to understand that the Immortal Hand that whips up whirlwinds is in charge, not us. Unlike those who are humbled by this higher power and who have the capacity to extend courtesy unconditionally to others because they honor the humanity in all they meet, the ill-mannered majority are courteous only when a display of good manners is convenient or expedient. General Robert E. Lee, a product of a culture which proscribed courtliness no matter the circumstances, seldom scolded his subordinates, and when he did, he couched his criticism in the mildest of terms. When Jeb Stuart and his cavalry reached Gettysburg on July 2 after the battle had commenced, historians tell us that Lee was restrained when he remarked upon the late arrival of the legendary raider. He was not even harsh with the man some say cost him a victory in Pennsylvania.

For charitable people, the expression of courtesy is not contingent upon changing fortunes, but today’s high-tech cretin turns courtesy on and off like a faucet and is only civil when civility is profitable. Unable to grasp the distinction between aggressive behavior and standing up for oneself when necessary, the average person confuses rudeness with honesty, aggression with strength. Some of the strongest people I know are quiet and polite; some of the weakest are loud and uncouth. Women in particular misunderstand what it means to be strong. In an adolescent and misguided attempt to emulate those they view as oppressors, the women of the 90’s believe that they have the right to be rude. Looking tough in their shoulder-padded suits and sporting cropped hair, they swagger and sneer as they look down their noses and speak in clipped precise mean-voice. Liberated girls exult in being called bitches and hope that, by acting like the bullies they think men are, they will prove that they are no longer victims and are in control. Women of this sort err when they assume that I will be cowed by their cold, hard words because I am from a long line of refined, biscuit baking, childrearing women who were made out of something—women who were just as comfortable serving guests applesauce cake and coffee as they were wringing chicken necks or driving Massey Fergusons.

While rudeness in speech might be commonplace, the absence of courtesy is most evident on our highways, where angry apes in overdrive compete for supremacy. These road warriors, traveling at lethal speeds, are oblivious to other people and the natural world as they race from point A to point B. About a year or so ago, on the way to a conference, I was carpooling with another person. As we proceeded, she was driving 70 miles per hour only inches, it seemed to me, from the bumper of the car in front of us. We were surrounded by other leadfooted drivers also blithely tailgating. Several cars ahead of ours, I saw a deer trying to leap across the fast-moving traffic jam. I saw no sign of the doe as my coworker and I sped by the point where she had been bounding over the roadway. I mentioned the deer, but my companion had not noticed the animal so pitifully caught up in the rush-hour nightmare. My coworker and other self-absorbed drivers travel the highways and see nothing. Driving blindly, unthinkingly, and dangerously, they do not bother dimming the lights when they meet cars at night; they drive over double yellow lines; and, with suicidal glee, they recklessly pass other vehicles, often forcing oncoming traffic to take to the shoulder of the road to avoid head-on collisions.

Egocentrism and the abandonment of etiquette are transforming highways into war zones and eroding our thin veneer of civilization. Courtesy and its attendant rituals, viewed as quaint eccentricities today, keep a society glued together and Joseph Conrad’s underlying darkness at bay. Most disturbing is the fact that we are failing to instill self-restraint and altruism in our children. They are growing up willy-nilly in households managed by self-actualized but ineffective parents. With undignified obsequiousness, the contemporary parent will stand while he gives his child the last seat in the room, permits his child to speak boldly and rudely to adults, and allows him to control every situation.

Somewhere between abusing children and bowing before them, there lies reason. Parents do not necessarily need to spank their children. They just need to provide them with boundaries to delineate proper behavior, and consequences to discourage unacceptable behavior, even if providing those boundaries and consequences is inopportune or messy. We are all born with the morals of tenth-century Scythian horsemen; our parents and other adults are supposed to civilize us. But our children are being raised by busy-busy parents who are distracted by other matters, and who find that excusing or ignoring barbaric behavior is easier than confronting it. And some parents will even interfere with the lessons to be learned from a Catholic education. I am acquainted with a teacher at a school in the archdiocese of Washington, D.C. She is pretty, polite, and fair, but she is also tough as nails when it comes to tolerating mischief. She and her fellow teachers must bear the brunt of parental rage with no support from above because her school’s principal, observing all kinds of p.c. niceties, does not back them when they attempt to hold children accountable for their irresponsibility or disrespect.

It does not take a commune to raise good children, but if, even in private schools, they are not taught to control themselves and parents are too preoccupied to do their duty, what kind of future are we sowing? As I look ahead, I imagine myself old, feeble, in a nursing home, and completely at the mercy of one of our unholy progeny all grown up and working as a geriatric nurse or aide. I am unnerved by the thought of having to depend on a sociopath to provide for my basic human needs when I am incapacitated by age. Even now, nurses and aides and other medical people have little compassion. I recognize that they must contend with physicians who would be gods and rude and demanding patients and family members, and that they are overworked in hospitals that are top-heavy with aggressive, bottom-line-oriented, resume-building administrators and short of the hands-on staff that dispense the blessed drugs that ease pain. Still, there is no excuse for treating patients and their needs with scorn or apathy. Contemporary hospitals might look state-of-the-art from outside and advertise their concern for humanity with zippy, peppy jingles aired over local radio stations, but—reflecting the values of our society—the people who work in these counterfeit sanctuaries seem to care very little about people or their miseries.

To escape a world where charity is not to be found in hospitals or anywhere else, I plan to move someday to greener pastures. The transformation of the culture of my state into that of the Northeast is almost complete, so I will be migrating eventually to the Blue Ridge Mountains, where courtesy is not considered an aberration and where I have retreated from time to time in the past. Developers and urbanites have begun to invade John Boy’s country—Charlottesville has already fallen—and his culture too will disappear with time, but there are still spots along the Parkway where the outrages of scurrying modern man and woman and their issue seem to be lightyears away. When I do leave my Maryland and settle in Virginia, the birthplace of my great-grandfather, Bushrod Smith Nash, I will be considered by the locals just another newcomer from up North, but though their lyrical high-country accent will mask my almost imperceptible one and they will misunderstand who I am, I will be happy to be back home with my kinsmen.