A number of my Facebook friends have now shared this blog post by John Skylar. It’s appeared on my news feed with sufficient frequency that even I, who do my best to remain oblivious to most news that’s less than sixty-six million years old, finally had to click through and read.
Let’s be clear. New York is a part of my essence. I’ve lived in central Virginia and in Boston and I’ve spent as much time in Los Angeles as many Angelinos, but no one has ever been surprised to learn that I was born and raised in Queens. I’m a Mets fan, for pity’s sake. (And I refer to everything north of the Bronx as “Canada,” because really, isn’t it?)
Nevertheless, I only had one response to the ninety-five theses that Mr. Skylar nailed to the door of the World Outside New York. That response was: no.
Here’s the argument: many New Yorkers “have high-pressure jobs and their time is very precious”; as a result of these demanding, time-sensitive jobs, New Yorkers have developed a “flow” to their daily lives; unthinking tourists disrupt that flow; therefore, New Yorkers are not being rude when they do things like shove or curse at or otherwise mistreat tourists. In fact, it is the tourists who are in the wrong, and so New York is not a “rude city.”
No.
I love New York, but it is not a fantasy kingdom where the enchantments of Wall Street brokers keep normal standards of human decorum at bay.
There are a few examples of rank hypocrisy in Mr. Skylar’s essay. To wit: he writes that “you will get farther with other people if you do not always blame them for the things that go wrong in your life,” apparently unaware of the irony in writing this immediately after blaming tens of millions of tourists for disrupting his daily commute. He also decries the “sense of entitlement” implied by tourists’ behavior, but has no problem with the sense of entitlement implied by his “our way or the highway” argument.
I won’t focus on these points, although I do think it’s worth noting that tourism is a fundamental part of New York’s economy, that tax dollars from tourism help to pay for the public services that maintain New York’s “flow,” and that many (if not most) of New York’s “high-pressure” jobs would disappear if tourists stopped visiting. All of that is beside the real point here.
The real point is that even if tourists are unwittingly disruptive, it would not follow that New Yorkers have justification to “curse at” or “barrel right into” those tourists. Mr. Skylar’s argument is predicated on the idea that tourists ought to adopt a city’s rules of etiquette when visiting the city. I’m willing to grant that, if only for the sake of argument. What I’m not willing to grant is that the citizens of a city are justified in being rude if tourists don’t adopt the city’s rules of etiquette. A guest’s impoliteness is not a host’s license to be an asshole.
You might think, as I would imagine many of my friends who so enthusiastically agree with Mr. Skylar’s essay do, that I’ve missed the essay’s crucial point. I haven’t. The crucial point is supposed to be that tourists are being rude since rudeness is defined as violating rules of etiquette. But that’s not Mr. Skylar’s conclusion: he’s arguing that because tourists are rude, it follows that New Yorkers are not. And, well: no.
I’ll admit that the conclusion could follow from slightly different premises. If it were somehow polite to be rude in New York, then it would be the case that a visitor would be rude by not being rude, and so the polite response to the visitor’s rudeness would be rude behavior. (Take however much time you need to parse that out.) But that would undermine the whole “New Yorkers aren’t rude” idea from the very start, and by definition.
Still, no one is proposing that cursing and shoving are polite in New York. It’s rude to curse at a Starbucks barista who gives you Earl Gray instead of green tea. It’s rude to push aside a co-worker so that you can get into the elevator first. As the cliche goes: two wrongs don’t make a right. Even in the light of perceived breaches of etiquette, it’s rude to be rude.
Look: I’m no saint. I get huffy when a pedestrian ahead of me walks a fraction of a mile per hour slower than I do or when I miss a train because the throng of people milling about right in front of the doors can’t decide whether or not they need the express. That’s the way New Yorkers act. But that doesn’t make it right, even in New York.
We in this city are supposed to be citizens of the world in which we fancy ourselves the center. Fine. But let’s not forget the fact that it’s a world in which cursing at strangers or forcing other people aside is impolite at best, regardless of the other rules of conduct we add on top of those two. In short: acting rudely makes you rude, even in New York.
So stop. Please.
