Let’s just start here: if you think someone is being rude — a stranger, who is otherwise keeping to themselves — and your method of attempting to teach them to be more courteous involves physically assaulting them, by sitting on them, say, then something has gone horribly wrong in your own etiquette lessons.Perhaps by now you’ve seen the video that is circulating, causing much conversation, which shows an incident on a Toronto subway car. In it, a middle-aged woman, upset that a young man has propped his feet on the edge of a seat in an apparently mostly empty subway car, sits on his feet. He asks her repeatedly to get off of him. “I’m sorry, I can’t” she says. He insults and swears at her. “I’m trying to explain to you that your feet shouldn’t be on the seat,” she says. “There are lots of social rules,” she says. “We’re a society, we all have to live together,” she says. Eventually the young man pushes her off — fairly gently, as pushes go — and she pushes the emergency alarm, and they continue to bicker as they wait for security.This video shows an escalating cavalcade of petty incivility, both parties pointlessly piling one bit of misbehavior atop another. There’s lots of evidence here of the kinds of things people do when they’re being jerks, if that’s what you’re looking for. But to my astonishment, much of the reaction to this video as it’s gone viral — even here in my own office — involves celebrating the woman’s petulant stand in defense of seat integrity. As if she is some kind of propriety Charles Bronson, a subway bylaw vigilante scouring the underground looking for minor breaches of etiquette in order to teach the punks a lesson. They cheer her on, vicariously sticking it to every manspreader, bag-seater, and loud-music listener who has made them mildly uncomfortab ...
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