What is the problem people have with manners, nowadays? The other morning I boarded a Metro bus and lit up a fat stogie (a nice Cuban smuggled in from Canada), and you should have heard all the rude comments I received. You would think civility had gone out of style.
Not only that, but when my dog buddy relieved himself on my neighbor’s property, that impertinent busybody neighbor, whom I once considered a friend, complained and made me remove the dog doo from among her azaleas. Hey, crap happens. She did not have to go off the charts hysterical, so I guess she never had schooling in good citizenship.
People, what da ya going to do? You would think they would have something more constructive to go on about than to tell me to pick up the garbage that I threw out my car window as I pulled away from the curb the other day. You know how clutter piles up in a glove box. Later, on that same madcap errand run, I dumped a bunch of junk on a vacant lot because I do not want to pay the high prices at the landfill. I mean, one place is as good as the next. Am I right or what?
Then there was the time a few weeks ago when I vacuumed my car at the local Brown Bear car wash place. Must keep up appearances, you know. Because the vacuum system had such a deafening sound, I had to blast my ultra-cool audio system to its limits so I could hear my tunes—made the earth rock, I did. Can you believe it, some buttinsky tapped me on the shoulder and told me to turn the beats down or he would beat me down. How rude! It takes all kinds.
If rudeness were a virtue, most of us would be saints. Pardon the disingenuous rhetorical strategy, but all of the above examples I witnessed without taking an active role as either the offender or the complainant. Regardless, it seems evident that too many of our fellow citizens ignore the manners they learned, if, in fact, they learned manners as part of their upbringing.
Silence is indeed golden, but it is hard to find. Recently, I read that the Hoh Valley on the Olympic Peninsula rates as one of the quietest places on earth. (Waldeck) Good news for people like me who just cannot tolerate the thump bump chukka pow pop and ka-boom sounds that we have purposefully design to foul our environment. My point is simple enough: if it is wrong to throw our trash onto the street, to light up on an airplane (why do they need “No Smoking” signs anyway?), to allow our dog friends to shit on the footpath, or to pour dirty motor oil into the lake, then it is equally wrong to make noise that is harmful to health.
Former U.S. Surgeon General William H. Stewart said in 1978, “Calling noise a nuisance is like calling smog an inconvenience. Noise must be considered a hazard to the health of people everywhere.”
Much of the literature on the subject underscores the idea that too much noise in our daily lives carries with it hypertension, anxiety, and cognitive shortages. (Matheson) Inordinate noise levels are harmful to health. Hearing loss, increased anxiety and stress, and physical health deficits all result from the almost daily bombardment of unwanted and unnecessary racket. Why do you think those leaf blower insurgents wear earplugs? Just how much damage noise causes is in dispute but not the conclusion that noise is bad for our physical and psychological health.
Last year our town finished a construction job along the street on which I live. New sewer, water, and electrical conduits wormed under the roadway, sidewalks installed, and the pavement scraped clear before adding a new state-of-the-art street surface. A useful project it seemed to all our neighbors until that the beep-beep-beep of the monster machines filled the air for over a year. Jackhammers, compressors, shouts over the din, earthmovers rattling the windows and shaking the house foundations, huge motors revving to the task—all this and more drove me from the serene quiet that I normally expect when working from home. Even though the noise from the espresso machine at Starbucks drove me to the other side, I found the coffee shop a place where I could retreat from the maddening clamor of city life. And I do not even live in the city. I guess I have a hypersensitivity to sound. I am not alone. Some people cannot eat peanuts or they will die. We insist on burn bans when atmospheric inversions cause people to darn near choke to death. And, for the safety of the public, we post speed limits on our highways and byways. We need to look out for each other, so why do we allow all that deleterious noise to insinuate itself into our lives?
One winter not long ago, I took a sabbatical, traveling to Newfoundland for a retreat from the hubbub. It seemed like a grand idea at the time. Port Rexton, the small outport where wife Kathrina, my dog Toby, and I found refuge on the edge of the map seemed clear of traffic noise, airline flyovers, and all the other confounding uproar that comes from people and their machines. We could find the peace of the Lord there among the moose and bunchberries. But once the snow covered the stunted trees and tracks near our remote cottage, the snowmobiles started going lickety-split. I sat in our upstairs bedroom that I had fashioned into a study. I watched the snow pile up along the gray Atlantic. Ah, I thought, this is a haven of tranquility. Smoke curled from a chimney a half mile away, the only other residence within viewing range. Then I saw them. I heard them. They descended like rolling thunder on the deep snow that surrounded our retreat—a half-dozen riders circling the house, kicking up scarves of snow, yahooing and goosing two-stroke engines.
Except for the Hoh Valley and a scant few other places on our big blue marble, there are not many places left in which one can escape noise. According to a white paper published by the United Kingdom’s Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs:
It’s estimated that the annual social cost of urban road noise in England is £7 to 10 billion. This places it at a similar magnitude to road accidents (£9 billion) and significantly greater than the impact on climate change (£1 to 4 billion). A report published by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in March 2011 identified environmental noise as the second largest environmental health risk in Western Europe.” (Government)
Degradation of sea, plant, and animal life occurs because our too noisy world shakes, rattles, and rolls. Even inanimate objects suffer from waves of sound: think of an opera singer hitting a high note and shattering a glass, or a clap of thunder setting off sensitive car alarms. Sound frequencies cause energy waves that assault whatever is in their way. Over time, the battering ram of sound can peel the paint off a cathedral ceiling. And it gets worse with each passing decade because we are the noisiest critters on earth and more and more of us populate our delicate planet.
And as we multiply, we make more noisy tools and machines. One of the worst offenders in the war against pollution is the gas-powered leaf blower, ditto for its cousin the gas-powered weed eater. According to Brian Palmer, those gizmos pollute the air in two ways: they make unspeakable noise pollution while fouling the air like a million cows passing gas. (Palmer) Many communities have bans or are in the process of banning the use of those machines, but progress comes slowly.
Imagine living under a flight path near Sea-Tac airport. You gussy up the driveway with your dust blower, you take a spin on your earthquake inducing Harley, you play who-can-bark-the-loudest with your dogs in the front yard, and you then test your car alarm just to be sure it is working properly. But enough of that. You have Seahawks tickets for later in the day. You, along with 67,000 other fans, will scream your head off for the pleasure of making deafening noise.
Really, you might as well take a long hatpin and stick it through your eyeball and into your brain.
Government, UK. Noise pollution: economic analysis. December 2014. 5 February 2015.
Harmon, Katherine. 27 August 2012. livescience. Documant. 27 January 2015.
Matheson, Stephen A Stansfeld and Mark P. British Medical Bulletin. 2003. Document. 1 February 2015.
Palmer, Brian. Washington Post. 16 September 2013. 5 February 2015.
Waldeck, Katie. February 2013. Care2. 27 January 2015.