NBA Brawl - Loss of Civility?
No.....It's much worse than that.

The brawl that took place in Michigan was wrong on so many levels that I don't even need to address it. People are calling for a return to a more civilized era. People are bemoaning the decline of values and morals. Let me be the first to say that they're all wrong!

I have written previously about how I feel about stuff like etiquette and civility. While their intent is nothing but positive but once you realize where all those prescribed rules came from, they're not healthy for our society - They're outdated and irrelevent. A new set of rules must be set but only in an organic process.

These social rules became part of our society through European culture that assumed that men are superior, women are for childrearing, and that whites are inherently superior to all other races. Now that we know these assumptions are groundless and more importantly, we live in a multicultural society where these assumptions are more irrelevent than the slide rule, why should we follow rules suited to another time?

These rules and its respective asumptions have silenced a majority of the population for far too long. Finally, people are speaking out and expressing themselves more freely much in the spirit of what the founding fathers had in mind. The major problem is that people are speaking in the language of violence.

No matter how you look at it, violence begat the United States of America and Americans have shown its apparent "genetic" disposition for violence all too often. It's therapy 101, you remove certain small barriers only to reveal bigger issues. Up until now, people have either been blind to the issues or have found ways to put up with it. Now, they can't possibly ignore it. Blaming it on lack of manners won't make the problem go away.

I'm not even going to go into the many ways in which violence has found a home in every aspect of our culture. It needs to be dealt with head on. There's no easy solution and it's going to take a major paradigm shift. We may not see a solution in our lifetime but it must be addressed or it could be the Achilles heel that is resposible for our downfall.