Pirate's Cove

Thoughts of the night from the late Robert Heinlein, from his novel Friday

“A dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot…”

What made me think about that quote was a minor confrontation this morning. I went to the community gym, and this lady saw me right behind her and still didn’t even bother to hold the door into the community center. I was right behind her going to the door into the gym area. She again failed.

On the way out, I didn’t bother holding the door for her (it was serendipitous that we left at same time. Was not planned). She started laying into me, saying how rude and nasty I was. When I pointed out that she had done the same thing twice, she told me that was different, and was talking about herself. I just turned and left. Along with the gross growth of the Entitlement mentality has also brought on a loss of politeness and manners, a loss of consideration.

I’m sure we each run into this little losses on a daily timescale. People not only think they’re entitled, but the do it at the expense of others.

A few others:

• “‘Bread and Circuses’ is the cancer of democracy, the fatal disease for which there is no cure. Democracy often works beautifully at first. But once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader—the barbarians enter Rome.”
• “There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.”
• “The first principle of freedom is the right to go to hell in your own handbasket.”
• “Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed.”