Letter to the Editor - The Lakeville Journal - 6-24-21

Good manners can be found everywhere one may look for them

I write in reference to the letter entitled “Manners are at a premium now,” that appeared in your June 17, 2021, edition. In that piece a Ms. Whittlesey of Gallatin N.Y. and Lakeville, suggests that Realtors “could perhaps coach new area residents on how to behave.” 

It is not clear what constitutes “new” residents, but it seems that remembering the Shagroy might be the dividing line. That would make everyone who came here after 1989 a newbie. 

I want to commend Ms Whittlesey for her “newbie radar.” She mentions “a grim-faced stranger who unapologetically rammed her shopping cart into my path.”  Unless Ms W. knows personally every resident of the area, how did she know she had been cut off by a new resident? And the same about the woman who was wearing spurs around town.  Don’t old-time residents ride?

Also, I have been in the deli line many times both at LaBonne’s and the Sharon Farm Market and I have never heard new residents or old, tourists or anyone refer to other people in line as “riff-raff.”  Indeed, I have never heard any comments at all about the other people standing in line. (And apparently neither has Ms. W. herself.  She does not write that she herself heard, but that, “Other new residents have been heard referring to local workers lined up……”)

It is time to kill the chauvinistic stereotype of the courteous long-suffering local resident and the brash, uncouth, new arrival, generally from the “city.”

Six months ago, my wife had a nasty fall and fractured a hip. Since then, she gets around on a walker or in a wheelchair. We have found that just as many people on the Upper West Side of Manhattan offer to help us as do in Salisbury/Lakeville/ Sharon.

That is because courtesy, kindness, considerateness, are randomly but widely distributed innate virtues among all groups of people. I have never found any correlation between good manners and race, religion, sex, national origin, or, for that matter, place of residence. Having lived your whole life—or at least since 1989—in the circulation area of The Lakeville Journal confers no special guarantee of goodness.

Lawrence Smith

New York, N.Y., and Sharon