How is it we have fallen to this level of disrespect?

Boston Globe

Beverly Beckham

Before I was an adult, I never heard my father swear. Not even damn or hell.

I’m sure he knew his share of curse words but he didn’t use profanity around me. Nobody I knew did except for my friend’s mother who said things like, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, give me patience,” and “Sweet God in Heaven, don’t make me have to come upstairs and get you,” which she claimed were prayers of intercession, not curse words. And my Uncle Frank, whom my aunt started to date when I was around 8, and whose language was salty because, my father explained, “Frank is in the Coast Guard,” leaving me to believe that the sea, which to me was Nantasket Beach, was as full of colorful words swimming about as it was of fish.

Swearing was actually a sin in the Roman Catholic church back when I was growing up, right up there with “Thou shalt not kill.” “Forgive me, father, for I have sinned. I called my sister an ass.” But Frank didn’t have to worry about confessing because he was Protestant, which back then was a sin all by itself.

When Frank and Lorraine got married, they weren’t allowed to take their wedding vows in the church. They had their ceremony in the rectory, which was a little like having a dinner party in a pantry. But that’s the way it was. It’s progress that being Protestant isn’t a sin anymore.

So many things that used to be sins or frowned on or outright forbidden are better off in the dustbins of history. I am aware of this every day.

But civility isn’t one of them. I miss respect. I miss being able to walk down the street with a child and not have to explain what the words on a T-shirt mean. I miss having a door held. I miss please and thank you. I miss common courtesy, an anachronism now. I miss, most of all, language that doesn’t demean and disparage and denigrate.

Earlier this month, an NBC Sports reporter, Kelli Stavast, was interviewing NASCAR race winner Brandon Brown at Alabama’s Talladega Superspeedway and in the background people were chanting. So Stavast acknowledged this and said with a smile, “You can hear the chants from the crowd, ‘Let’s go Brandon!’” But the crowd wasn’t congratulating Brown. It was cursing Joe Biden, the president of the United States, with a crude slur.

The video of this chant went viral. Then someone wrote a rap song inspired by the chant and that went viral. Now, nearly a month later, “Let’s Go Brandon” and “FJB” are emblazoned on shirts and hats and banners that are being sold all over the world.

How is it we have fallen to this level of disrespect?

It reminds me of how I behave in my car. People are crazy in their cars. I’m crazy. On foot, would any of us ever curse at a person who got in our way? Would we nearly knock someone over to get ahead in a line? Would we refuse to let someone merge or say out loud to a person’s face, the things we mutter in our cars?

“Use your words,” we tell our children when they’re having a tantrum. “Tell me what you want.” And they don’t.

But neither do we.

“Let’s Go Brandon” demeans not just the president of the United States, but every single American.

My daughter Lauren likes to say that no one is useless. They can always serve as a bad example.

I’m hoping she’s right. I’m hoping that this bad example of ordinary people — parents, kids, parents with kids, parents with their parents — behaving in such an unacceptable way, makes us all say enough. I’m hoping that what we have learned in the last 20 months about the importance of words, how they hurt, how they reverberate, helps us to see these words for what they are: crude speech that promotes hate.

I’m hoping that civility isn’t a permanent casualty of change. That the baby hasn’t been thrown out with the bath water. That people can stop shouting at each other and start talking.

People have a right to disagree. My friend, Mary Ann, has — for at least 40 years — prayed for me to see the light about the teachings of the Catholic Church. To see her light. I haven’t.

If she had a T-shirt made that yelled at me? If she shouted at me in a crowd. If she hated me?

How, I wonder, would this help either of us? How does hate help anyone?