{"id":1549,"date":"2009-02-14T17:03:43","date_gmt":"2009-02-15T01:03:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/wordpress\/?p=1549"},"modified":"2009-02-15T06:37:38","modified_gmt":"2009-02-15T14:37:38","slug":"recession-proofing-society","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/recession-proofing-society\/","title":{"rendered":"Civility and order"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Peggy Noonan <a href=\"http:\/\/air.wsj.com\/article\/SB123388255500354969.html\">argues<\/a> that faith will hold the United States together during the recession:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Tuesday I talked to people who support a Catholic college. I said a great stress is here and coming, and people are going to be reminded of what&#8217;s important, and the greatest of these will be our faith, it&#8217;s what is going to hold us together as a country.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Here are some of the behaviors that <em>I\u2019d<\/em> nominate to help us through this economic crisis: saying \u2018excuse me\u2019 when you bump into someone in the store, patiently waiting your turn in line, waving thank-you when a driver lets you into his lane.\u00a0 In other words, the daily gestures of courtesy and self-restraint that make up civility.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>We take for granted that parents will teach children manners, or assume that if they don\u2019t, schools will act as a back-stop.\u00a0 But what if\u00a0 neither the family nor schools perform that duty? \u00a0I see no connection between belief in a supernatural being and public etiquette.\u00a0 Rather, the cultivation of manners rests on an understanding of how fragile social order is and how it needs to be constantly buttressed by instruction and correction.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>I live with a constant apprehension that the thin veneer of civilized manners will erode.\u00a0 At the present bleak moment, I monitor litter with the greatest anxiety.\u00a0 A person who drops his hamburger wrapper on the sidewalk is a threat to society, in my view.\u00a0 So far, the New York streets and subways seem no dirtier than before\u2014the population of plastic-bag tumbleweeds seems to be holding fairly steady. But if trash starts swirling around our streets and plazas, we will know that the time to despair has arrived.<\/p>\n<p>As for what will get us out of the economic crisis, believers will work out for themselves why, if God is assurance of a brighter future, he didn&#8217;t do something before hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs.\u00a0 I&#8217;ll bank on the powerful drive to trade, build enterprises, and enjoy the fruits of human ingenuity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Peggy Noonan argues that faith will hold the United States together during the recession: Tuesday I talked to people who support a Catholic college. I said a great stress is here and coming, and people are going to be reminded &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/recession-proofing-society\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[206],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1549"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1549"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1549\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1552,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1549\/revisions\/1552"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}