Today I had a short exchange with a stranger who had recently returned from an extended vacation in Spain. What she wanted to share and talk about wasn’t the food, the scenery, or the vistas. Instead, she wanted to retell an incident that epitomized her experience. She was making her way up a mountain road where she was basically causing a traffic backup because she was having trouble driving her rental car. Yet no one beeped, no one yelled. At some point, when stopped at a stoplight, another driver calmly got out of his car and came over to ask if there was a problem. After she explained that her car simply couldn’t go any faster, he explained to her that she was in the wrong gear, in spite of driving an automatic, and needed to switch gears. The Good Samaritan then quietly walked back to his car and drove off.

The storyteller then waxed poetic for a while about how wonderful everyone there was; how calm they were; how peaceful the day-to-day was. When I suggested it was because people were simply polite to one another, she jumped at that like it was some kind of epiphany.  She then went on to bemoan the fact that we need more of this here, we’ve lost this here, and why can’t we be like that. As if there were a silver bullet that made people use good manners.

It’s not magic. It’s simply good manners. It’s learning them, using them, and then holding others – both children and adults - to that same standard.