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As most of you know, I'm a part-time smoker. Or a full-time smoker, if something in my life (usually work) is giving me a ridiculously high level of stress. I picked up the smoking habit my first or second year in college (I don't remember which) as a natural compliment to the amount of caffeine I was drinking and the need to get a break or two during the day. It was also a means of maintaining some sort of social contact -- the office I worked in at the school isolated me from the rest of the department and pretty much anything that didn't accept ~110 volts at 12 amps. Going downstairs to the Computer Lab to grab my buddy M.C. for a smoke was a great way to maintain some human contact.

So, back to the point. I smoke. I know some folks who also smoke, or smoke part-time the same way I do. I also know lots of people who dislike or actively hate smokers because they hate the smoke or the smell of smoke that usually comes with them. Fair enough and I go out of my way to give them their space. So long as they don't hassle me I have no problem with their standpoint. However, I know a very few folks who hate smokers because so many of them are goddamn litterbugs (I personally am surprised at how few fall into this class compared to people who just don't care for the smoke). You know how there's always fifteen or twenty cigarette butts laying on the ground outside any given office door? Ever notice how they're always thrown on the ground even if the building management has been polite enough to set out an ash can or a "Cease Fire" bucket? Yeah, those smokers. I hate them too, honestly. I don't throw my cigarette butts out the window of the Expedition if I'm driving and I don't just drop them on the ground outside a building when a receptacle is available (I roll the cherry out to make certain I do not set the trash bin aflame). I try to be courteous to non-smokers around me and, by extension, I try to be courteous to the environment people live and work in. I don't think that a vast prairie of flattened, stepped-upon cigarette filters is either of those things. It's particularly maddening to me because I don't see any reason for it. If there's an ash can and you're standing three feet away from it you can damn well toss your filter into there when you're done. Yet for whatever reason the culture in this country says it's okay to be lazy and throw the filter on the ground, sooner or later it'll get cleaned up or blown/washed away by some force or another. That force might be the building's janitorial staff, or a local eco-club, or just a heavy rain. If I had to put it into words I would say the attitude is one of Hey, whatever! I can't be bothered.

So now that I've explained my position on these things, let's rewind to Thursday of this week.
( Feren and the dumbass smoker )

Tonight I was reading her entry about a "classless society." What she's referring to is not a society that is free from classes of people, but a society free of the concept of class, wherein civility and standards of behavior are discarded.

I got the feeling she thinks we're rapidly sliding into that particular pit. I think we're already there.

Let me share a snippet from the not-so-distant past that validates this suspicion of mine. The scene unfolded just a little while ago, on the first of this month, when my parents were in town and stopped at my place for a rest on their drive back from FL to MN. lady_curmudgeon, my mother, my father and I had gone to our favorite local restaurant to enjoy a nice dinner. We got there sometime around seven in the evening. The restaurant was busy but not jammed by any means. We were seated in a booth. The booth immediately adjacent to us (behind where my parents chose to sit) was being bussed. Shortly after we ordered our meals that booth was seated with three individuals. There were two guys and one girl in this party. We were "lucky" enough to be treated to every single part of their conversation because they seemed to have absolutely no internal regulation to the volume of their voices.

But that wasn't the only aspect about having them behind us that sucked. I think my father put it best when we walked into the parking lot on our way to the truck. He said, and this is a direct quote... After listening to those people sitting behind us for forty-five minutes I had to get out of there. I don't know about you, but I try not to use the word "motherfucker" more than sixteen, eighteen times at the most in my dinner conversation.

He's not exaggerating the situation, either. I readily admit that I can (and frequently do) have a pretty foul mouth -- but even I have never been nearly as vulgar as those two men were. And they were at a dinner table. In a public place. With that woman (girlfriend?) sitting with them, no less! What the hell, man? As captain18 would say, "That's classy with a `k`." In the spirit of "one good list deserves another," I'm going to augment Spoothbrush's list of things that show an utter lack of upbringing with a few items from my own list. Nothing says "I am uncouth and as socialized as a howler monkey" like:

• laser pointers and cell phones in the theater [we've all suffered this]
• changing your baby's diaper on a store's checkout counter when there's a perfectly usable bathroom (with a Koala Kare station in it, no less) only twenty feet away [personally witnessed at my old job as a cashier]
• posting pictures of yourself at the Playboy Mansion in your cube [I wish I was kidding about this happening at my work place]
• open and extensive fondling your girlfriend/boyfriend/partner/spouse/pet/whatever in front of children while you're in public space [saw this during last summer's company outing and there's just so many horror stories within the various fandoms]
• embracing the fruits of ignorance
• ...and making excuses for people who do any of the preceding.

Maybe we hit the height of our civilization back in the early 1900s and have been sliding downward in a linear manner ever since. Maybe this degeneration is more accurately described as a bell curve, I can't say for certain. I only know that the utter inability of any one person or group of people to comment negatively on such behavior without being shouted down by the masses is enough to ensure this trend is not going to disappear and will likely accelerate.

And people ask why I never want to go out anymore...

Another quick means to an end