A writer for the Aberdeen American News hits a homerun today. Elaine Babcock writes that the world would be much better if people showed more respect for each other. By respect she means watching your language and dressing appropriately.
A few years ago I took some college classes in Spearfish. I had expected some changes in education since I got my degree years ago, but I was surprised at the changes I saw.
The biggest changes were in respect, dress and language. In college FTA (First Time Around) students dressed up, not down. Students used polite, proper language. STA (Second Time Around) the attire was not just casual, it was sloppy, and in my opinion, inappropriate in the academic world.
But she doesn't just have it in for students:
Somehow it seems that respect began to erode when school and office dress codes were abolished in the name of freedom and personal rights. At one time, teachers were required to dress up every day. They looked different from their students. Then as styles changed women were allowed to wear pantsuits. Pants were a good idea, especially on recess duty on cold days. But soon the dress code deteriorated so that many faculty members, male and female, were wearing bedraggled blue jeans, T-shirts and jogging shoes, which, by the way may cost more than dress clothes.
In offices, casual Friday attire became everyday attire and casual Friday became slob Friday.
As for the freedom to choose, no one is taking away anyone's freedoms by requiring professional dress in public workplaces. We can wear whatever we choose on our own time.
My students tire of my ragging on their style of dress (invariably t-shirt or sweatshirt and jeans or sweatpants). I remind them of this excellent documentary I saw once about Jewish intellectuals at CCNY in the 1930s and how the young men of that time wore a jacket and tie to class (by the way, those of you for whom "neo-conservative" simply means a conservative you don't like really need to see this film). Or I point them towards this Joseph Epstein piece on perpetual adolescence that begins thusly:
WHENEVER ANYONE under the age of 50 sees old newsreel film of Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak of 1941, he is almost certain to be brought up by the fact that nearly everyone in the male-dominated crowds--in New York, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland--seems to be wearing a suit and a fedora or other serious adult hat. The people in those earlier baseball crowds, though watching a boyish game, nonetheless had a radically different conception of themselves than most Americans do now. A major depression was ending, a world war was on. Even though they were watching an entertainment that took most of them back to their boyhoods, they thought of themselves as adults, no longer kids, but grown-ups, adults, men.
How different from today, when a good part of the crowd at any ballgame, no matter what the age, is wearing jeans and team caps and T-shirts; and let us not neglect those (one hopes) benign maniacs who paint their faces in home-team colors or spell out, on their bare chests, the letters of the names of star players: S-O-S-A.
I like to point out that Joe DiMaggio never went out in public without a jacket and tie. Joltin' Joe may have been extreme, but so are we in the other direction. How we dress says something about how seriously we take what we are doing. So what does it say when we go to school or church dressed in much the same way we do when we mow our lawn? One of my favorite episodes of Curb Your Enthusiam has an older man (played by Ed Asner) who goes to a lawyer to get his will re-written. It happens to be "casual Friday" at the law office. The older man gets angry that the lawyer that is going to help decide the fate of his estate is dressed so casually. To him it's a sign of a, well, casual attitude. The lawyer tries to explain. "No, it's just today. It's casual Friday." The older man screams, "Are you going to be that casual about my estate!" and storms out of the office. If only that kind of thing happened in real life. In years past as a student I dressed like a slob, too. Eventually when I got to grad school I finally met some people who cared enough to say, "You really need to start dressing better." I wish someone would have told me to straighten myself up a lot earlier.
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