CIVILITY IS A MATTER OF CHARACTER
When a man with a cane and a pregnant woman faced off for an empty subway seat, the outcome drew applause
When a young guy wearing a baseball cap just about leaped from his seat in a crowded subway car the other morning to offer it to me, my internal reaction was a stunned, “Holy crap, you are now officially old!”
Outwardly, though, I smiled, thanked him and said I was travelling only one stop on the line. And the fellow, who looked to be about 18, engagingly went about offering his seat to someone else in the car.
I don’t believe my appearance is that of a particularly frail person, but I was carrying a large and cumbersome shoulder bag that threw my balance off; I might well have looked as if I could use a seat.
Most of us think we look younger than we are, of course. And to anyone 18 or thereabouts, even 25 is old. I was ancient to that young fellow — invisible but for the big bag. And in offering me a seat, he was doing something that, arguably, not everyone would have done.
A delightful feature in the New York Times, Metropolitan Diary, recounts snippets of life in New York City. This month a reader named Stephanie Neel described getting on the A train from Brooklyn to Manhattan one morning shortly before 9, when the car was packed. A passenger with a seat dashed out just as the doors were closing and the two people closest to the seat moved for it, “then stopped midlunge and looked at each other.”
He was an older man, carrying a cane. She was obviously pregnant. “The whole train car held its breath,” she wrote. “Who was more deserving? Would there be a fight? Why isn’t someone else standing up?
“Finally, as the train started to lurch out of the station, the man with the cane insisted, ‘ Pregnancy beats cane! Pregnancy beats cane!’”
The passengers began to laugh and applaud, Neel wrote, shaking their heads at each other. The woman eventually insisted that the man take the seat: She was getting off at the next stop, she said. But the other passengers, it seems, chuckled the rest of the way into Manhattan.
Nearly 200 readers were moved to comment. Some, predictably, bemoaned declining civility — among the young, among men, among everyone. Several wanted to know why someone else hadn’t stood up so that both passengers could have had seats.
One woman described how, even in late pregnancy, she usually stood on the subway because people seldom offered her a seat. “Most sitting people would find something very interesting in their fingernails or pants leg or anything to avoid making eye contact,” she wrote.
When someone did offer her a seat, she wrote, it was invariably an older woman. Debate ensued in the comments section whether men or women were more likely to offer their seats.
Others, though, wrote to say that, in their experience, young people were unfailingly polite and that they had consistently been offered everything from seats on the subway to help with strollers when they needed either.
One doctor wrote to say that studies increasingly show a link between sedentary behaviour among the elderly and serious disease, even death. Unless they’re truly incapacitated, the doctor opined, “keep them seated, and you’re shepherding them to the grave.”
A few people suggested that someone needing a seat should simply ask a fellow passenger to give up his or hers. This struck me as impractical. And it stirred in me a distant memory. One summer years ago — I remember only the scene, not where it took place — I was riding a city bus on which most of the seats were occupied. A woman and a child of five or six who looked to be her son were in the seat in front of me when a priest, wearing a cassock, boarded.
He stopped at the woman’s seat — he obviously knew her — and started to speak to her. In short order the priest, a man young enough that his hair was still dark, grabbed one of the child’s ears and, holding it, pulled the boy to his feet and took his seat.
How much more civilized when the offer comes from the person in the seat. I make a point of standing to offer mine to people on the bus or subway who look as if they could use it more than I can; sometimes they refuse, and that is their prerogative. I appreciate that some people don’t like being offered a seat — and I count myself among them, at least for now — because it makes us feel diminished. Frail. Old.
There is a great deal of tut- tutting about young people and a decline in civility. Conveniently, we forget that many of us were not particularly civil as younger people. Certainly, there is a brutishness unique to the gaggles of teens who drape themselves about the seats of subway cars as if they own them, as if they are at home in their own rooms. But that’s not all young people, by any means.
Besides, I believe that some people are inherently civil and others are not; I’m not convinced age has much to do with it.
It’s my hunch that people who offer their seat to passengers they figure need it more than they do are those who learned, somewhere along the way, that it’s the right thing to do. Perhaps their parents modelled it, perhaps teachers, perhaps others.
And perhaps the young man who offered me his seat with such alacrity, with such a genuinely well- meaning air that morning, was one of them.