Why do New Yorkers seem rude? →
(via ubercalifragilisticxpialidocious)
In the United States today, public behavior is ruled by a kind of compulsory cheer that people probably picked up from television and advertising and that coats their transactions in a smooth, shiny glaze, making them seem empty-headed. New Yorkers have not yet gotten the knack of this. That may be because so many of them grew up outside the United States, and also because they live so much of their lives in public, eating their lunches in parks, riding to work in subways. It’s hard to keep up the smiley face for that many hours a day.
In my opinion, this shows a certain degree of ignorance about the rest of America. For instance, the friendliness in the South has very little to do with what we see on television. Southerners were famous for their friendliness, hospitality and good manners long before there was television and before the notion of mass media and mass marketing had really come into being.
Where I grew up, being nice was never optional, and as far as I’m concerned, there’s rarely an occasion that justifies the sort of random and unnecessary rudeness that some (not all) New Yorkers seem to enjoy. I don’t think being rude or scowling all the time makes you seem smarter, either. (The notion that being angry makes you smart and being happy makes you dumb must be some New York concept, and might be a better explanation for why New Yorkers behave as they do in public than “everyone else is a commercial zombie.”) To me it seems like those who are rude have poor impulse control, acting like spoiled toddlers when something doesn’t go their way. When you scowl all the time I think, “Wow, they must be really miserable human beings.”
And reading the section on “New Yorkers are more familiar” just made me wonder if this woman has ever left New York. People do those things everywhere. In the south, people probably do even moreso. (We talk to everybody, even and especially strangers. It’s a requirement.) It’s just that in southern culture, you’re nice about it.
The rest of the article made it seem as if New Yorkers actually are nice — just only to each other. So maybe that is why everyone else thinks they’re rude.
That last paragraph is just dead wrong, period. (As is a lot of the rest of the post, but I’ll skip over that.) If anything, it’s the other way around — we’re nicer to out-of-towners than we are to each other. Like a lot of New Yorkers, I’m actually kind of amused by the notion that we’re “rude.” The reputation is squarely contradicted by anyone I know who’s actually visited or lived here. This city has a lot of problems — the high cost of living, the weather, the crowds — but rudeness isn’t one of them.
