Testing our ear drums - and our civility
Donway, Walter
S INGLENESS is here to stay; many people are and will continue to be single and it will take on an increasingly positive character. At this point the positive value is coming predominately from...
...The uneivility of the radio toters is but one" symptom...
...As I watched them, however, I noticed that they did glance around slyly observing the other passengers...
...But until civility has vanished, we will not know how important it was...
...On a bus, everyone can read, chat quietly, or watch the sidewalk show...
...I will ask for civility, because I feel miserable when I do not ask...
...Because of the mobility of many single people they often develop a kind of psychological gregariousness that extends itself in new kinds of friendships...
...But that is a personal declaration...
...Passengers woke, craned their necks, murmured angrily to one another...
...It is a bother to speak up, of course...
...See this one...
...My concern is not the people for whom the heavy beat is a high, or a sedative, a way not of confronting others but of dropping out...
...And it's true that many radio toters are young Blacks or Hispanics...
...If the churches and the family do not offer some good alternatives to single people, then singles will get caught up in the false communities of capitalist investors...
...Single people challenge the view that marriage and family are normative...
...Here, as elsewhere, what used to be called "social determinism" seems to break down...
...they look, then glance away, afraid...
...Two young men about college age--big, blond, in T-shirts that showed off imposing biceps--crouched over a huge radio, 26 October 1979:591apparently oblivious to all but the music...
...But the bus drivers don't enforce the rules...
...It is the rending of our civility, of the fabric of our lives together in this city...
...The real uneasiness, I think, is fear of rebuff, of being sassed and made to feel demeaned and even more frustrated...
...And when it is gone, we may wonder at how little once stopped us from defending it...
...That is what I began to suspect, one evening a few months ago, when American Airlines delayed its 8:55 flight from Kennedy International Airport to Rochester, New York, for nearly three hours, while mechanics repaired the pilot's microphone...
...Singleness cannot be perceived as a pity, but must be seen as a valuable way for people to choose to live...
...I have spoken whenever it seemed reasonably prudent, and will speak again...
...I left without buying a radio...
...Passengers queued up, served themselves, munched quietly...
...but what happens if everyone plays his portable radio with the three-and-a-half-inch speakers...
...When a really big radio passes on a bicycle rack, playing at top volume, it seems to tear a long slash in the tranquil atmosphere...
...the radio again fell silent, and stayed silent, for the rest of the trip...
...It remained.., well, private vice...
...I hadn't really come to buy one...
...It's designed all wrong for the American market...
...Suddenly, from near the back of the plane, came radio music: hoarse, static-filled because of bad reception inside the plane, but above all, loud...
...Watch people at such times, especially the older people who spend much of their day in the park ! I I WALTER DONW^Y is Executive Associate of The Commonwealth Fund and a regular contributor to Private Practice, a journal of the Congress of County Medical Societies...
...About an hour later, passengers filed into the plane, ready at last...
...That is at the heart of the power play, the real squeeze people feel: the general level of fear is so high that most of us have decided to sit in the subway, the bus, the park, and just take it...
...Its literal origin is "to citify" --to encourage behavior that makes it possible for us to live together in close quarters...
...And it is from blocked lives, strangled energy, that violence--the ultimate incivility --comes...
...In a movie theater, everyone can sit quietly and watch the film...
...during the warm weather...
...Children woke, people muttered and craned their necks to look...
...The risks are real, though--especially where the element of racial confrontation may potentially be present--and risk-taking is a matter of personal values...
...Civility is social virtue, a virtue made of necessity...
...Later, an airline employee pushed in a big cart piled with trays of Danish pastry, coffee and tea, soda and ice...
...Their faces stiffen...
...In Christianity one can choose to be celibate "for the kingdom," but what about those who do not want to be described in such highly religious rhetoric...
...At such times, I confess, I hear another sound...
...Then, like the screech and crush of an intersection 9 tomobile smashup, music--a raucous wheezing and thumping--blared in a far corner of the lounge...
...some padded about the lounge, carrying quivering rubber alligators...
...Of course, the "power" of the radio toters--the futile power to offend, impose, frustrate, even frighten--must arise from feelings of actual powerlessness...
...How can single people function to mitigate against some of the problems in society, especially problems in the family and in churches and get their own needs I THE RADIO POWER PLAY met at the same time...
...Sit in Central Park at lunch time...
...and, by implication, it's a question for all of us--a question of civility...
...Yes, I shouted back, it did...
...One way is for the churches (in their various structural arrangements, community and family) to see the positive value of singles and to understand their needs...
...Recently, a"no radios" sign has joined the usual "no smoking" sign in some buses...
...I have watched as many people hesitate to ask for civility from their ownchildren as from the radio toters...
...and in parks, usually, there is no one to enforce them, either...
...Testing our...
...they sense our backing away, and they push forward...
...Isn't there something brazen about the radio toters, a deliberate testing of their power to impose openly on the rest of us...
...I have to say, though, that I suspect that fear of physical confrontation is often a rationalization...
...But thekids won't buy, because the design doesn't reflect the power...
...What shall we do, then, when just bumping someone's elbow in the subway can be fatal...
...He responded, and the radio fell silent...
...Isn't it a kind of power play...
...As it waited its turn to take off, lights dimmed inside, passengers dozed...
...He turned it off...
...somehow it often seems easier to "take it...
...A lovely lady standing in a bus during the after-work crush asked a teen-ager, in no uncertain terms, please to turn off his monster radio...
...M Y CONCERN, here, is not the teenage obsession with radios and nonstop, raucous music...
...he said...
...The flight attendant hurried to the rear of the plane...
...The assumptions of religion and the family have often been negative when it comes to singleness...
...But just as frustration, rage, can be part of the explanation of crime, without excusing it, we may acknowledge the causes of uncivility without excusing or tolerating it...
...Today, in any public area of New York City (and in other major cities, I suspect)--on buses and subway U~ins, in movie theater ticket line.~, or jus t walking along--you must expect the sudden, rising howl and static thudding of an approaching twenty-pound, $99.95,3i89 stereo radio (or tape deck, or special combination...
...But I do buy the analysis...
...Men, in particular, may fear that they will be challenged and (sensibly, of course) will have to back off and so feel humiliated as a man...
...Commonweal: 592...
...There is too much variety in the race, age, apparent education, and signs of economic well-being among the radio toters to trace the syndrome to any but essentially individual motives...
...no one can but notice that...
...Today, it has become an issue of civility, for "civil" in the sense I mean implies merely a refraining from rudeness...
...You can hear it coming, fat away down some leafy path: murmuring canned voices, a jangling, a thumping...
...Except at World Series time, however, when those odd guys walked around with tiny radios pressed to their ears, none of this went public...
...Among the most basic is that shared facilities must be for activities a//,-users may pursue...
...You may choose to speak out directly, as I shall, or perhaps speak in other contexts, other ways, for civility as such...
...Nor is it the Central Park radio toters, I'd guess, who flock to Studio 54 and numberless other discotheques...
...But I urge that, in this instance, we stand up for "culture" in the basic sense...
...We have a fight to demand that they desist...
...In London, you don't have to, but here-yes...
...No one else did anything, so I complained to the attendant at the ticket counter...
...It is a question of power, I'm afraid...
...Single people have time for service that married and community people simply do not...
...Some of the children slept on the floor, wrapped in blankets...
...That radio's got three-and-a-half-inch speakers--big, for a portable...
...And don't our supermarkets, department stores, and restaurants all feature nonstop, piped-in music, as though our species breathed it...
...ear drums and our ClVlhty I I I I I l WALTER DONWAY T HE YOUNG Englishman tending the Radio Shack store on York Avenue at 85th Street tapped the glass of the counter front...
...but what happens if everyone stands up to get a better view of the screen...
...The problem may be as broad as the mood of our culture and our city--a mood that seems akin to appeasement, a pervasive uncertainty about what we may properly demand...
...In these days when religion and the family both appear to be in some difficulty themselves, it might be a good time to take another look at the singles--at their power as well 9 as their needs, at their value as well as their demands...
...At this point the positive value is coming predominately from the marketplace--the one place where singles are valued and welcome...
...They have been with us for decades--people who can't bear a moment alone without their radio or television...
...It's odd, but not an accident,-perhaps, that I have seen only women protest to the radio toters...
...The young man turned to me and, with a choke of actual embarrassment, asked (shouting, of course) if his radio bothered me...
...Single people have time and as such are a great natural resource...
...In the flight lounge, the passengers--many of them returning from 9 at Disney World in Orlando, Florida--chatted quietly, yawned, read, and scratched their peeling sunburns...
...anti some parks are now posted against radio playing...
...This time, I complained immediately and loudly...
...Singleness should be given a positive reading and sOme theoretical support in and by the churches...
...I know there has been talk of a multiplicity of cultures in America, and even of an "imperialism" of middle class, standard American culture over Afro-American, HispanicAmerican, American-Indian, American-youth, and American-counter cultures...
...A culture exists only when people find a way to live together, to cooperate, and all cooperation is by rules...
...the flight attendants whispered requests for drink orders...
...I, for one, will not...
...It doesn't look powerful...
...That is a problem for parents--and I don't see what leg some parents will stand on, when they themselves spend four hours in front of the television set every evening...
...B Y ANY REASONABLE standard of culture and civility, the radio totersare wrong...
Vol. 106 • October 1979 • No. 19
