Has Steven Slater Made "Polite Debate" An Oxymoron?

Is there some kind of crazy pill being put in our drinking water that makes people behave so badly and so publicly?  Or is it just that incidences of adults acting like brats are now captured on YouTube and other media and thus quickly than would have happened in total-tech times (yes, there really was an era--fairly recent, in fact-- when YouTube did not exist)?

I'm not sure, but if it's true that courtesy is contagious, then it must also be true that obnoxious behavior begets more of the same as well.  And there is lots of it these days.  People are just, well, mad.  Not only passengers on too-crowded and not well serviced planes, but the flight attendants who are overworked and harassed as well.  And the barristas at Starbucks, trained to recite lines like "If it's not perfect, tell me, and I'll make it right." can be irritating to the very people they are supposed to impress with their coddling efforts.

Alan Goldsmith, the genius behind Noodle Talk, sent me a couple of links yesterday, each of them an incident of terrible behavior in a retail customer/employee situation.  In one, a Starbucks customer got so angry when the barrista insisted that she indicate what she did not want on her bagel ("You have to tell me if you don't want butter or cream cheese") the store's manager called the cops and hauled her away.  And a woman in Toledo, Ohio, recently got so upset that at 6:30 AM her local McDonalds would not serve her chicken McNuggets, that she went on a rampage, striking the employee at the drive-in window (even trying to climb up into the window) and ended up smashing the window before driving off. 

Are these people one-off nuts?  Or do they represent--Steven Slater style--a general feeling of helpless anger at life in general, at all the things that don't work as we want them to?  My guess is that yes, these people are highly unusual in their acting out, but they nonetheless are symptomatic of something else going on.  We've lost it, ladies and gentlemen.  In fact, there are few ladies and gentlemen among us. 

 
It's not just in New York, this place where anonymity reigns (or appears to).  The chicken McNuggets fan was in Toledo, Ohio.  But I do wonder about small towns and whether behavior is different there.  I grew up in a small town in Wisconsin and I've talked with others who have similar backgrounds and we agree: there is a chilling effect on your instinct to cut someone off at an intersection when you know it is likely you'll see them again in church or at your grocery store around the corner.  Are people equally ticked off in small-town America but they just don't act out because they are inhibited by a kind of "Politeness from Proximity" phenomenon?

Not sure.  But there is something about saying hello--even to strangers--that happens in some locales that I like.  Maybe I'm just old-fashioned.