Courtesy Always Has A Purpose

Something small happened to me today. I want to tell you about it, because I don’t think it was small at all.

I sat down to write a short note on the platform where I post my work. I went to the same spot I always use, on the main page of my own site. The box where I used to type was gone. There was no warning, no notice and no explanation. My old notes were still sitting there, but the door to write new ones had been taken off its hinges overnight.

I found another way in after a bit of hunting. It works fine, and my notes still land where they always did. So in one sense, no harm done. But I sat there for a minute afterward, and something about it stuck with me. It wasn’t the inconvenience. It was the silence.

Nobody told me. Nobody thought I needed to be told. Somewhere, somebody made a decision that changed how thousands of people do their work, and not one of us got a single sentence about it. My best guess is that they want all of us writing on their main site instead of our own pages. That keeps people in their feed longer. I can’t prove that’s the reason. But I notice that nobody bothered to tell me any reason at all.

There was a time when that wouldn’t have happened. Not because people were saints, but because there was a thing called courtesy, and folks practiced it without thinking twice.

Think about the old general store, the kind that used to sit at the crossroads in every small town. If the owner was going to move the flour to a different shelf, he’d tell you about it the next time you came in. “Flour’s in the back now, by the feed sacks. Needed the room up front.” That’s all it took. A sentence, a reason and a little nod that said he knew you’d be looking for it.

He didn’t do that because a rule told him to. He did it because you were his neighbor. He’d see you at church on Sunday and at the ball game on Friday night. If he treated you poorly, he’d have to look you in the eye about it. Courtesy was just the way people behaved when they knew they’d have to face each other.

That’s the part we’ve lost. Not the manners exactly, but the facing. The folks making decisions now will never meet the people those decisions land on. They look at numbers on a screen. How many clicks, how many minutes and how many people stayed. Courtesy doesn’t show up on that screen. So when they’re deciding what matters, courtesy is the first thing cut.

Here’s what it would have cost them. One short email. Two sentences. “We’re moving where you write your notes. Here’s where to find it now.” That’s it. Maybe thirty seconds of somebody’s time. And it would have told every writer on that platform one simple thing: you matter enough to be told.

I want to say something about courtesy that I think gets missed. People treat it like the frosting on the cake. Nice to have, but not the cake itself. They think it’s the soft stuff. Please and thank you. Holding a door. Saying good morning.

But courtesy was never small. It was never the frosting. It was the flour in the cake. It’s how a society tells its members that they count.

Every time somebody gives you notice before a change, they’re telling you that you have a right to know what’s happening to you. Every time somebody gives you a reason, they’re telling you that you’re grown enough to understand it. Every time somebody says sorry for the trouble, they’re telling you your time and trouble are real. Those are small acts, but they carry big messages.

And when those small acts disappear, the big messages disappear with them. People stop feeling like they count. Slowly, without anyone ever announcing it, folks learn that the people above them don’t owe them an explanation. That they’ll just wake up one morning and find things changed, and they’re expected to adjust and keep quiet.

That’s the real damage. Not the annoyance of the moment. The annoyance passes. What doesn’t pass is the lesson underneath it. People learn to shrug. They learn that speaking up doesn’t matter. They learn that nobody above them is listening, so why bother saying anything at all.

A society full of people who’ve learned to shrug is in trouble. It may not look like trouble at first. Everything keeps running. The lights stay on. But underneath, something has gone hollow. The people have stopped expecting to be treated fairly by anything bigger than themselves. And when people stop expecting fairness, they stop demanding it.

I’ve been writing all week about our leaders in Washington. About how the people spoke loud and clear at the ballot box, and then got told by the old guard to take it slow. About how we’re being talked to like children who don’t understand how things work. About how the people who choose our leaders do it behind closed doors, weeks before anybody is sworn in.

I didn’t see it at first, but that’s the same story as my little note box. It’s the same failure wearing different clothes. Whether it’s a platform moving a button or a party picking a leader, the problem is the same. Decisions get made about us without a word to us. No notice. No reason. No courtesy.

When a leader takes your vote and then won’t explain what he plans to do with it, that’s a failure of courtesy. When a company changes the rules on you overnight, that’s a failure of courtesy. When a government acts and expects you to read about it later, if you can find it, that’s a failure of courtesy too. Different sizes, same root.

And here’s what I’ve come to believe. You can’t have accountability without courtesy. They grow from the same seed. Accountability is just courtesy with teeth. It’s the big version of telling people what you did and why. A leader who won’t extend the little courtesies will never accept the big accountability. If he won’t explain a small change, he surely won’t explain a large one.

So what do we do about it? I’ve thought about that, and I don’t think the answer is to get angry. Anger burns hot and fast, and then it’s gone. The answer is to expect courtesy again, out loud, and to practice it ourselves.

Expect it. When something changes and nobody told you, say so. Not with a fit, but with a fair question. “Why wasn’t this announced?” “Where was the notice?” Ask it of the companies you use. Ask it of the leaders you elect. Ask it in a calm, steady voice, and keep asking. The people who make decisions count on our silence. Every time we speak up, we remind them we’re still here.

And practice it. This is the part we can control. Give notice before you change things on the people around you. Give a reason when you ask something of somebody. Say thank you, and mean it. Treat the folks in your life like neighbors you’ll see on Sunday, because most of them are.

That may sound too small to matter against the size of the problem. But I don’t think it is. Courtesy spreads the same way its absence does. One person at a time, one act at a time. A society relearns courtesy the same way it forgot it: slowly, through ordinary people deciding how they’ll behave.

I’ll close with this. The general store owner who told you about the flour wasn’t a great man. He wasn’t famous or powerful or rich. He was just a decent fellow who understood that the people who walked through his door were people, not numbers. That understanding held his little corner of the world together.

We need more of that understanding, from the store owners, the tech companies, the leaders in Washington and ourselves. Courtesy was never small. It was always the thing holding the rest of it up. And it’s about time we started asking for it back.

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This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.

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