Our county has long had a “Choose Civility” campaign --
green bumper-stickers on hybrids and Volvos as far as the eye can see. It always struck me as lame: anyone who would be influenced by such a genteel appeal would already be civil to begin
with; nor can one easily picture
the citizen, chin on fist and finger to lips, thinking: “Hmm … Civility …
Barbarism … Civility … Barbarism … Hmm
…….”
However, it may have had an effect. This Hallowe’en was the most … civil in years.
We always offer a choice of several substantial candies, but
each child is siupposed to take just one. And this year, everyone, even the teenagers, hewed to this
rule. Indeed the teens, this time,
often added things like “Thank you, sir” and “Happy Hallowe’en". (Really, I could die tonight, the
nation’s future is in good hands.)
There was just one semi-exception -- and that, of the
rule-proving kind. ...
A tiny boy, who had just that day turned two, borne about in
his father’s arms, was experiencing his very first Hallowe’en. He was quite excited. I handed him a candy-bar, at which his
face lit up; and his father put it
in a little bag. But the boy,
straining against restraint, his eyes as big as saucers, cantilevered forward,
both chubby arms with flapping fingers
outstretched towards the brimming bowl, with its unimaginable wealth of
colorful candies. “Now now, just
one,” I gently admonished; and his
father echoed this admonition.
So, what have we here:
a little greedy-guts?
Perhaps -- but this is greed -- if greed it be -- absolutely pure and
unalloyed, with no invidious admixture, along the lines of “I want more than Bobby gets” or “Having all these goodies makes me King of the
Mountain. No, it is rather
that original archaic nisus that
propels all creatures to avail themselves of such plenty as they might stumble
upon, in a world punctuated by times of want. Reese’s Pieces had been few and far between during the last
glaciation; and our little
cavebaby or troglo-tot
understandably wished to take on provisions while they were to be
had. Nor, in such a frame of mind,
would such pernickity precision arithmetic as “Just one” have any cognitive
meaning, let alone moral force:
surely the tyke had already quite forgotten the piece his father had
stashed in the bag. As soon bid the bunny shun the carrot,
or the babe the breast.
We are not born civil,
nor civilized, but must be patiently, persistently socialized, first by our
mother and father, and later by society at large. My bet is that this tot is well on track, to himself
be making the rounds, a generation from now, with his own squirming offspring
in tow -- possibly on airborne scooters, or on Mars, who knows that the future
may have in store; but some things
don’t change:
“Just one, little fellow; just one.”
[Footnote, which it pains me to report: Not everywhere is the picture so rosy.
Just in the next county over, as a friend tells it, the
children who came to her door were mostly well-behaved, but in a couple of
cases the mom reached over and
grabbed a fistful, sinking her arm in
up to the wrist.
-- Well, but then their county didn’t have a “Choose
Civility” campaign.]
