ON BEING POLITE

I’m writing this posting mainly to gripe. What is the big deal about being polite? How come it is so dang important with some situations and not others? Is there some law that says you HAVE to be polite?

If there is I’m not aware of it. And so what happens if you aren’t polite? Well nothing good I suppose, but I’m not sure being polite always ends up in you having good things happen to you either.

What I do know that polite only works with nice things like nice people. You never heard of a polite bad guy. Come to think of it you don’t hear of a polite super hero type either.

Polite to me is sort of reserved for people who are thought of as nice like grannies and ministers and stuff. Well that is unless you are talking about say the Reverend Analbe. I wouldn’t call him polite when he drops by for a visit and always ends up making me feel guilty just for breathing and then still hogs all the good stuff to eat like donuts. That isn’t polite to me.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying being polite is necessarily a bad thing. All I’m saying is that I sure wish that it wasn’t the kind of think only certain people had to do.

Of course I do appreciate how it might be hard for say a general to be polite. I just don’t think that he could shout stuff like “charge and kill em all” and then add please afterwards. It just wouldn’t work.

Somewhere along the way I sort of got the idea that rude is the opposite of being polite. Only I’m not as convinced as I used to be about that part.

Rude is well, being darn right nasty. And you can be other than polite without getting rude. At least by that I mean you can talk to someone and not say please enough, which seems to be the big part of polite and still not be rude.

Anyway what has cheesed me off about this polite thing is because my buddy Otis brought this up the other day. There we were out chasing down some griminals and after we busted the creep Otis gave me this lecture regarding how important it was that we act professional in terms of being grimefighters. Somewhere in the middle of all of that he mentioned this polite thing. I just didn’t feel that it applied.

But it didn’t keep him from giving me a lecture. I tell you folks to me if I catch a griminal I’m going to be sure he gets treated like a griminal. And if that means being other than somebody who says please a lot then so be it. I don’t care if Otis feels that catching some ten year-old kid littering should be treated different than with some adult grimefighter. For myself the only time it matters is when the ten year old kid as a dad who is a professional wrestler. Then polite is a way of making sure he doesn’t turn you into a pretzel.