Randy Jenkins of Glendale, Ariz., has experienced similar boorishness on the road. He bought his electric car a year ago. Since September, when the alternative-fuel program's costs came to light, he has noticed an increase in drivers cutting him off or giving him angry stares. "There's a lot of one-finger saluting going on," said Jenkins, who runs a payroll service.

Perhaps the worst result of the alternative-fuel scandal is the stigma it has put on vehicles that don't pollute the air, such as Jenkins' Solectria, which he says he bought because his wife doesn't like getting gas. "I haven't gotten a dime out of the state of Arizona for this," he said. "I paid twice the price for a car, now to have my neighbors mad at me. ... And they don't know what motivated me to buy."

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The death of decency

By MATT SCHUDEL Staff Writer Sun-Sentinel South Florida

(...) We may not have clinical proof, but we have yet to find an exception to this rule: Everyone who drives a black pickup truck or sports-utility vehicle especially one with tinted windows is a jerk.

Man or woman, it doesn't matter. We see the evidence every day in traffic, and were waiting to be proved wrong.

Still waiting . . .

Many ordinary, law-abiding drivers are seized by a cold, silent panic whenever they look up and see a truck or SUV filling the entire width of the rear-view mirror. There's something menacing about these high-riding vehicles, and the arrogant, cell-phone-yakking road warriors behind the wheel know it. They honk if you don't turn right on red, they push you faster than you want to go, they ride your bumper until you move aside. Then, as they speed on past, they flip you the finger.

It's the sign of our times.

But it's not just trucks that are the problem, and it's not just traffic. A mean-spirited selfishness has taken hold of our culture, and it wont let go. It finds its purest voice in the Spanish expression Viva yo! long live me.

It's my world, so get out of my way.

Even if their numbers are small, those selfish louts with their big cars, loud voices and bad manners will continue to make our lives miserable for one simple reason: There's nothing we can do about it. The old values of courtesy, politeness and respect have been trampled under.

The indignities of the road are compounded with further indignities at work, at the movies, on the radio, from the profane mouths of strangers, in battles between neighbors. Pretty soon you've got more than a headache. You've got a national crisison your hands.

THE DICTIONARY defines incivility "as a lack of courtesy or politeness. " Once you're aware of it, you see it everywhere. It's practically the defining ethos of modern life. It has become so pervasive that, according to a 1996 poll for U.S. News & World Report, 89 percent of all Americans consider incivility a serious problem in our society. More than three-quarters of all Americans believe it has gotten worse in the last 10 years.

Incivility is the root of some of the most pernicious problems in our culture. Perceived slights on the street dissing, or the showing of disrespect have led to murder. In Brooklyn a teen-ager was shot to death when he didn't greet a second teen-ager with a high five. A young man was beaten and stabbed in a grocery store in suburban Bethesda, Md., when he complained to two men cutting ahead in the checkout line.

(...)

An unforeseen result of the casual revolution is that crass, selfish behavior has triumphed along with it. You cant say its mere coincidence. At baseball games today, men wear T-shirts or no shirts at all and shout profanities for all to hear. This is progress?

(...)

Its a serious thing, then, incivility. This open, dirty secret of American life is beginning to prompt some deep thinking. President Clinton, citing a "toxic atmosphere of cynicism" - and perhaps stung by attacks on his own character - has convened the National Commission on Civic Renewal, headed by former Democratic Sen. Sam Nunn and onetime Republican Cabinet member William J. Bennett. At least three other commissions, led by nationally prominent political figures Lamar Alexander, Bill Bradley and Patricia Schroeder, are dedicated to civic and cultural renewal.
No one can say why we've become such an uncivil society, but there are plenty of theories. In For Shame: The Loss of Common Decency in American Culture, James Twitchell, a professor at the University of Florida, links incivility with a lack of public shame and private responsibility. His chief culprit? Television advertising.
Another scholar, Nicholas Mills of Sarah Lawrence College in New York, attributes the "triumph of meanness" to the huge income disparity between average workers and corporate big shots.

Carol Travis, a Los Angeles psychologist and expert on anger, says incivility has grown worse because Americans blow up too easily.

"It's not that people are any angrier than they ever were," Travis has said. "The problem is that we let people get away with it. We celebrate aggressiveness."

(...)

BAD MANNERS HAVE always been with us, but in the past they didn't seem to be so widespread, let alone celebrated. When was the last time you saw a child shame another by rubbing one index finger across the other? Polite people are afraid, in this age of surliness, to criticize rudeness because they never know who might be carrying a gun. The moral authority of adult reproof and a haughty stare doesn't mean a thing today.

"Shame always hurts," says Twitch-ell, the University of Florida professor. "It's always repressive. But sometimes freedoms can be dangerous when indulged."
Not so long ago, high schools had courses in "civics," and manners were a central part of everyone's education. People learned to argue sensibly without erupting in anger. Civility made it possible to find a common ground of decency. It was the basis of everything from neighborliness to political de-bate.

Today, you can hardly discuss politics without incurring snickers of derision or outright hostility. Just the mention of the word shows how far politics has fallen in public respect.

Today, according to a Gallup poll, half of all Americans think politicians are "a little crooked." Slanted, one-dimensional attack ads are the norm. High-minded oratory has given way to mean-spirited spitefulness.

"You just wonder where is their sense of manners? Where's their sense of courtesy?" Newt Gingrich complained about the White House in 1995.

(...)

Small towns, once considered the cradles of kindness, have seen an "epidemic of incivility," according to Governing magazine, a publication for state and local officials. The meetings of county commissions and school boards have been interrupted by name-calling and fistfights.

It's no wonder the populace has turned cynical. Voter participation is at a historic low, and officeholders at every level have endured booing, hissing and obscene phone calls. Talk radio encourages listeners to trash public officials, no matter how irresponsible the claims, because it's good for ratings.

Incivility in politics is nothing new, however. In 1856, Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina attacked Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate, nearly beating him to death with a cane. And the most uncivil American politician of the 20th century may have been Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who thrived in that mythic era of national grace, the 1940s and '50s. His brand of wanton finger-pointing has left its vindictive taint on American politics ever since. He'd feel right at home today.

FOR MORE THAN a decade, Florida has had the dubious distinction of having the nation's highest crime rate. That's only one of many reasons why this state may be the most uncivil place in the country.
(...)

In Florida, it seems to be illegal to use a turn signal while driving. The roadways are so crazy that we hardly notice news of gun battles between racing cars on Interstate 95. A few weeks ago in Miami, a security guard hired to enforce civil behavior argued with a man over a parking space, then allegedly shot him to death for double parking.
"We've had people pulling guns," says Maj. Ken Howse of the Florida Highway Patrol's Tallahassee office, "we've had shootings, we've had rammings."
We've had enough.

During a five-month period in 1997, seven state troopers were struck by cars on I-95 in Miami-Dade County. One trooper, Robert G. Smith, was killed when his patrol car, stopped on the shoulder, was rammed by a drunk driver going 100 miles per hour.
"It was getting to the point the troopers were afraid to stop their cars on the side of the road," notes Lt. Ernesto Duarte of the Miami-Dade office of the Florida Highway Patrol. "So many were getting hit."

As a result, FHP adopted its Eye on 95 program, one of the country's first efforts to crack down on road rage.

"It's an alarming subject to law enforcement," says Duarte.

Road rage is a serious problem everywhere, though, not just in Florida. Two-thirds of the country's 41,000 traffic deaths in 1996 were caused by aggressive driving.
"It may be morning in America crime down, incomes up, inflation nonexistent," a recent Time magazine article explained, "but it's high noon on the country's streets and highways."

Four out of five drivers, according to a national survey, are angry most or all of the time they are behind the wheel. The National Safety Council, which administers safe-driving classes in South Florida, has special programs for hostile drivers, conducted by teachers trained in psychology. All of this comes at a time when drivers education, once almost compulsory in high schools, has all but disappeared because of budget cuts. Today, only 30 to 50 percent of new drivers have had a course in safe driving.

Post the signs now: Rough Road Ahead.

RUDENESS AND DANGER are everywhere, not just on the highway. With the state's waterways clogged with high-powered boats driven by drunken pilots who don't know what they're doing, Florida has become the center of the new trend of "boat rage." Boat owners, like drivers, even pull guns on one another. It's no wonder Florida leads the nation in boating deaths.

Delays, crowded flights and luggage restrictions have turned air travel into a virtual bedlam. Almost every ticket agent or flight attendant has horror stories of outbursts by passengers.

"For some reason, an airplane brings out the worst in people," says Jane Goodman of the Association of Flight Attendants. "I haven't heard of anyone reaching over a store counter and punching a clerk. I have heard of people assaulting flight attendants."

(...)

In the United States, a crime committed on a commercial flight is a federal offense. On international flights, cases are usually tried in the country of destination. More cases of midair incivility are being prosecuted all the time.

The loutish Finneran, for instance, was fined $50,000 and given a jail term. A Palm Coast, Fla., man named James Mullay was sentenced to two years in prison by an English judge after he became so violent on a flight from Orlando that passengers had to break his nose to subdue him. Others have received prison sentences of up to four years for assaulting passengers and crew.

"It's not necessarily men, it's not necessarily women, its not necessarily first class, its not necessarily coach," says Goodman.

Incivility, it would appear, is an equal-opportunity offender.

SEVERAL YEARS AGO, a man in New York went on a bizarre one-man crusade against incivility. If strangers jostled him on the sidewalk without saying "excuse me," he attacked them with a knife. Two weeks ago in Los Angeles, one pedestrian stabbed another in the eye with an umbrella. When it comes to enforcing civil behavior, it's No More Mr. Nice Guy.

Down through the centuries, every society has taken pains to pass on its own rules of civility. One of the purposes of religion is to teach believers how to behave. Courtesy handbooks have been commonplace in Western culture since at least 1528, when Italian diplomat Baldassare Castiglione published his guide to chivalric manners, The Courtier (also called Etiquette for Renaissance Gentlemen).

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote an essay called "On Manners," and Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, compiled a book of etiquette. Emily Post published her all-purpose etiquette book in 1922; the 75th-anniversary edition, by her great-granddaughter by marriage, Peggy Post, came out last year.

As early as the sixth century B.C., Aesop was passing on this moral message in his fable of the lion and the mouse: No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted. (Contrast this with the autobiographies of Dennis Rodman and rap star LL Cool J: Bad As I Wanna Be and I Make My Own Rules.)

(...)

But to attract an audience, each new show and its first-name host Oprah, Jenny, Jerry, Montel had to be more outrageous than its competitors.

It's impossible to say if one layer of scum is worse than another, but a good place to start is The Jenny Jones Show, March 6, 1995. On that date, an unsuspecting young man named Jonathan Schmitz was invited to meet a "secret admirer." No one told him that secret admirer was a man named Scott Amedure. Both men lived in the same trailer park in Michigan, and three days later a humiliated Schmitz killed Amedure with two blasts from a 12-gauge shotgun.

(...)

James Twitchell, the University of Florida professor, believes the Age of Incivility began in the 1960s, under the direct influence of television - in particular, TV advertising. Before television, according to Twitchell, advertising was often based on a sense of inadequacy. If you didn't buy a certain product - a car, toothpaste, pair of stockings - you were somehow not meeting social expectations. Individ-uality wasn't as important as fitting into the group.

"Of course shame inhibits behavior - that's the point," Twitchell writes in For Shame. "Of course it makes the individual feel bad. But it does so in the name of a higher social good."

With the rise of television, though, the old order changed. If a show or a commercial made a viewer feel upset or inadequate, the viewer would just switch the channel.

"The minute somebody tries to shame you," Twitchell says, "you're gone. Advertising is almost overwhelmingly based on the idea that 'you're special, you're important.' Civility is based on just the opposite."

SPORTSMANSHIP WAS once valued as the highest aim of athletics. You played with skill and determination, yes, but also with grace. You showed your opponent respect.

Sports remain one of the few realms of modern life in which etiquette is required. If you are whistled for unsportsmanlike conduct in football, you are penalized 15 yards. In basketball, you receive a technical foul.

(...)

Officials have been beaten and, in some cases, knocked unconscious by high-school and junior-high athletes. Sometimes coaches and parents even get in on the mayhem. Two years ago, a referee in a Philadelphia basketball league for 12-year-olds was so savagely beaten by coaches and fans that he received a concussion and a broken bone near his eye. A Wisconsin district attorney was removed from office after he pushed a referee into a wall during his son's junior-varsity basketball game.

(...)

CIVILITY IS, ultimately, a moral question: How do we treat others? That's why the issue reaches deeper than you might think at first. Civility is part of the fiber that binds our culture. If it frays and breaks, how long can a civil society survive?

Many people attribute the breakdown of public morality to a weakening influence of religion. But, in fact, churchgoing and belief in God are at their highest rates in decades.

In our hurried times, maybe were just too busy to be polite. Is civility simply out of date, like crinoline skirts and top hats?

(...)

"The greatest myth of all is that if you express anger you'll feel better," says writer and psychologist Carol Tavris. "We'll, you won't. The more you express anger, the angrier you get."

Anger resolution has become one of the hot topics in psychotherapy, as counselors teach people to settle their differences without rancor. Corpor-ations hire courtesy consultants to give their executives a more sensitive image. Some companies are beginning to rethink dress-down days, since casual wear leads to more confusion than standard business attire.

Etiquette books of all kinds - including gay etiquette and multicultural etiquette - fill entire shelves of bookstores. A few souls must still care about civility, or else Judith Martin's Miss Manners books wouldn't be best Sellers.
Still, the level of civility in this country has slid so far in the past 30 years that you have to wonder if anything can help us regain our dignity. How can the subtle minuet of civility overcome the boombox harshness of our modern Age?

Well, if nothing else is certain it's clear that we don't like the way our culture has been going. Incivility doesn't work. Incivility makes no one happy.

Maybe it's time to find something new to get us past the millennium before we crack up. Maybe, for a change, we should try being kind.

Leon James, Ph.D.
Diane Nahl, Ph.D.

Emotional disturbances at the wheel can be as dangerous as alcohol or drug impairment. We believe that aggressive driving is largely a product of routinely driving in emotionally impaired states due to insufficient training. Of course there is a range from mild to severe degrees of impairment. There is diminished self-control and impaired judgment due to emotions that interfere with objective perception and lead to biased thinking. A variety of impairments are associated with aggressive driving:

1. Under the influence of alcohol, drugs, medication, drowsiness, depression or severe pain.
   Driving under the influence of these mental states is aggressive because they distort perception, reduce self-control, and impose higher risk on other drivers.
   
2. Under the influence of anger or rage.
   Driving under the influence of anger is aggressive because it loosens inhibitions, intensifies self-righteous indignation, and encourages retaliation and unlawful acts.
   
3. Under the influence of fear or panic.
   Driving under the influence of fear is aggressive because it promotes irrational thought sequences that misinterpret the behavior of other drivers, perceiving threat where none is intended.
   
4. Under the influence of stress.
   Driving under the influence of stress is aggressive because it increases irritability and explosive reactions, and reduces self-control.
   
5. Driving distracted.
   Driving under the influence of distraction is aggressive because it endangers others due to inattention and imposes higher risk on other drivers.
   
6. Under the influence of speed and risk addiction
   Driving under the influence of speed addiction is aggressive because it imposes higher risk on others.
   
7. Self-appointed vigilante
   Driving under the influence of vengeance and retribution is aggressive because they encourage retaliation and unlawful acts.
   
8. Under the influence of habitual rushing mania, including reacting impulsively or unpredictably under time pressure.
   Driving under the influence of rushing mania is aggressive because it reduces self-control, imposes higher risk on others, and endangers them through inattention or opportunistic maneuvers.
   
9. Habitual disrespect for the law, ignoring regulations and harboring hostility towards officers.
   Being a scofflaw is aggressive because it encourages unlawful acts and imposes higher risk on others.
   
10. Habitual disrespect for others, holding biased assumptions and making wrong conclusions.
    Driving under the influence of disrespect is aggressive because it encourages retaliation, imposes higher risk on others, misinterprets the behavior of other drivers, perceives threat where none is intended, and denigrates others.
    
11. Lack of awareness and habitual denial of one's own driving mistakes.
    Driving under the influence of denial is aggressive because it reduces self-control, limits driver self-improvement and imposes higher risk on others.

New brain research suggests that emotions, not IQ,
may be the true measure of human intelligence

BY NANCY GIBBS

(...)

If there is a cornerstone to emotional intelligence on which most other emotional skills depend, it is a sense of self-awareness, of being smart about what we feel. A person whose day starts badly at home may be grouchy all day at work without quite knowing why. Once an emotional response comes into awareness--or, physiologically, is processed through the neocortex--the chances of handling it appropriately improve. Scientists refer to "metamood," the ability to pull back and recognize that "what I'm feeling is anger," or sorrow, or shame.

(...)

Some impulses seem to be easier to control than others. Anger, not surprisingly, is one of the hardest, perhaps because of its evolutionary value in priming people to action. Researchers believe anger usually arises out of a sense of being trespassed against--the belief that one is being robbed of what is rightfully his. The body's first response is a surge of energy, the release of a cascade of neurotransmitters called catecholamines. If a person is already aroused or under stress, the threshold for release is lower, which helps explain why people's tempers shorten during a hard day.

(...)

It is easy to draw the obvious lesson from these test results. How much happier would we be, how much more successful as individuals and civil as a society, if we were more alert to the importance of emotional intelligence and more adept at teaching it? From kindergartens to business schools to corporations across the country, people are taking seriously the idea that a little more time spent on the "touchy-feely" skills so often derided may in fact pay rich dividends.

In the corporate world, according to personnel executives, IQ gets you hired, but EQ gets you promoted. Goleman likes to tell of a manager at AT&T's Bell Labs, a think tank for brilliant engineers in New Jersey, who was asked to rank his top performers. They weren't the ones with the highest IQs; they were the ones whose E-mail got answered. Those workers who were good collaborators and networkers and popular with colleagues were more likely to get the cooperation they needed to reach their goals than the socially awkward, lone-wolf geniuses.

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(...)

Anger is "an emotional state that varies in intensity from mild irritation to intense fury and rage," according to Charles Spielberger, PhD, a psychologist who specializes in the study of anger. Like other emotions, it is accompanied by physiological and biological changes; when you get angry, your heart rate and blood pressure go up, as do the levels of your energy hormones, adrenaline, and noradrenaline.

(...)

The goal of anger management is to reduce both your emotional feelings and the physiological arousal that anger causes. You can't get rid of, or avoid, the things or the people that enrage you, nor can you change them, but you can learn to control your reactions.

(...)

People who are easily angered generally have what some psychologists call a low tolerance for frustration, meaning simply that they feel that they should not have to be subjected to frustration, inconvenience, or annoyance. They can't take things in stride, and they're particularly infuriated if the situation seems somehow unjust: for example, being corrected for a minor mistake.

(...)

Is It Good To "Let it All Hang Out?"

Psychologists now say that this is a dangerous myth. Some people use this theory as a license to hurt others. Research has found that "letting it rip" with anger actually escalates anger and aggression and does nothing to help you (or the person you're angry with) resolve the situation.

It's best to find out what it is that triggers your anger, and then to develop strategies to keep those triggers from tipping you over the edge.

(...)

Cognitive Restructuring

Simply put, this means changing the way you think. Angry people tend to curse, swear, or speak in highly colorful terms that reflect their inner thoughts. When you're angry, your thinking can get very exaggerated and overly dramatic. Try replacing these thoughts with more rational ones. For instance, instead of telling yourself, "oh, it's awful, it's terrible, everything's ruined," tell yourself, "it's frustrating, and it's understandable that I'm upset about it, but it's not the end of the world and getting angry is not going to fix it anyhow."

(...)

The underlying message of highly angry people, Dr. Deffenbacher says, is "things oughta go my way!" Angry people tend to feel that they are morally right, that any blocking or changing of their plans is an unbearable indignity and that they should NOT have to suffer this way. Maybe other people do, but not them!

(...)

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Cloudy Days May Increase 'Road Rage' Behavior

By Keith Mulvihill

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - While cloudy days have been known to bring on an occasional bout of the blues in some, new study findings suggest that sunless days may actually play a role in "road rage"--the highway phenomenon of aggressive driving marked by verbal or physical abuse.

In the new study, college students experienced nearly four times more symptoms of anxiety and irritability on a cloudy day compared with on a sunny day. Additionally, students were more likely to report observing aggressive driving, engaging in aggressive driving themselves, or having more feelings of anger and hostility on cloudy days than on sunny days.

Lead investigator, Dr. Mark Wagner, an associate professor of psychology at Wagner College in Staten Island, New York, presented the findings last month at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Society in New Orleans.

"I think that when a person is on the road, in a crowded urban area in particular, many things can cause them to feel stress (because there is the) constant threat from other drivers," Wagner explained in an interview with Reuters Health.

"Weather doesn't really cause (a person) to have road rage, but it can be a 'last straw' when other things have already caused them to feel irritable," he added.

In one portion of the study, Wagner and his team administered the same anxiety-measuring questionnaire to two separate groups of 40 college students. Students who took the questionnaire on a cloudy day garnered an anxiety scale rating of 14.5 while students who completed the questionnaire on a sunny day scored 3.7, Wagner told Reuters Health.

In a second part of the study, the investigators administered another questionnaire that assessed various aspects of road rage behavior on that day to four separate groups of 55 college students. The two groups who took the test on cloudy days reported that they engaged in more aggressive behavior while driving, observed more aggressive behavior while driving, and expressed more feeling of anger, hostility and irritation compared to those who took the test on sunny days, Wagner explained.

People may want to pay more attention to keep their own emotions in check, especially on cloudier days, and they should "watch out" for road rage from other people when the weather isn't sunny, Wagner said.

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