The Etiquette of a Democratic Nation

The process of democratizing our Western Civilization has been a slow, gradual but mostly progressive process. It is the process that initiated the Modern Age, which began in various places at different dates in the 15th century CE. In that century, the leading trends of civilization chose to no longer allow theocracy to justify hierarchical submission of the human intellect. From there other ideas began to evolve, including philosophical, scientific, political, social and economic. There were and still are groups that don't like democracy, though they may conveniently claim to for political purposes. Or, they may truly not understand what democracy actually means. Either way, there are people who are very patriotic about democracy, but their actions reflect the opposite. In this country today, we have people who don't like the idea that certain people have the right to vote, and they try to create obstacles (legislated and otherwise) to make it hard for targeted groups to do so. There are people who don't like certain groups of people to obtain socioeconomic stability or success. There are people who don't like women and other minorities to have leadership roles in business, science, politics or education. All of these qualities of thought are fundamentally undemocratic. There are also simple everyday behaviors that represent what are either rude or uninformed acts, if you are living in a democratic society and claim to belong to it. If you are reflexively rude or obnoxious to people in the service industry who are honestly trying to do a good job, that is reflection of aggressive class-consciousness. In a democratic society, there are rich, middle class and (sadly) also poor people, but the central idea is that we are all socially and legally equal. There is no etiquette book that says that because someone has a higher economic status that they have a right to mistreat or show unwarranted, unprovoked impatience toward a waitress/waiter, salesclerk, maintenance person, custodian or government servant who is trying to serve you. We do not legally recognize the prerogatives of aristocracy in this country, and neither should we condone social behaviors that reflect any such presumptions. A democratic society also does not condone or legally protect acts of rudeness toward a person because you don't like their gender, their race, their dialect, their economic status, their apparent sexual persuasion, their cultural attire, or their religion. Those people who are abusive toward others for these reasons are mentally inhabiting a totalitarian homogenized concept of society that does not exist upon the real democratic ground they actually tread. It is ironic that the people who are prone to these rude anti-democratic behaviors are often telling people different from themselves to leave the country -- even though whoever they are targeting have a perfect legal right to be here and usually are also citizens born or naturalized in our country. However, if there is any need to suggest who should leave, it should be those who act like the only people worthy of living here and enjoying its privileges are only those exactly like themselves. Of course, uncalled-for rudeness from people of any economic, cultural or gender status should really be frowned upon in any society -- democratic or otherwise. What is more, we didn't have the American Revolution so that we could independently recreate the same feudal society we broke from across the ocean.