Bear with me this week. It’s time for a rant!

Don Imus was fired from his talk show gig last week. He was fired because he used some words that were racially charged to refer to the women of the Rutgers Women’s Basketball team, runners-up in the NCAA championship. I don’t know why Don Imus used the words he did aloud. But I’m not surprised. He’s been shocking people for years. And we gave him the power to do it.

None of us should be surprised. We’ve let it happen. Something has disappeared in this society over the last generation. In my humble opinion what we’ve lost is civility. The dictionary defines civility as the “formal politeness that results from observing social conventions.”

I became aware of the necessity of civility in our society when I was twelve of thirteen years of age. I remember vividly the day I stood in the kitchen of our home. I was standing by the breakfast table; in front of me to the left was the doorway to the hallway. Our black maid was standing at the sink, probably washing some dishes or such. She said something to me. I do not remember what she said. But I remember my reply. I said, “No.” A nanosecond after that reply I found out my daddy was home. I found out when the back of his hand came looping around the edge of the hallway door and greeted my face. I took a quick airborne trip into the dining room. What was my offense? I didn’t say “ma’am.”

There were certain social conventions we observed in our home. One was being respectful to women and especially women who were your elders.

There was another time I was invited by Mrs. Hill, my history teacher, to join a party with some misfits in the Detention Hall following school. Now hear this: That happened fifty years ago. But to this day I’ll tell you Mrs. Hill was wrong! Still, I was placed on restriction. The next day my daddy was at the school giving Mrs. Hill a piece of his mind for he believed, also, that she was wrong. I had been placed on restriction not for what I supposedly had done but for failing to be respectful to my teacher in my dissent.

Civility is gone in today’s society. Don Imus made a living being rude to people. And he made millions doing it because the American people thought it cute. Neal Bortz, the syndicated talk-show host in Atlanta, calls the black female editor of The Atlanta Journal Constitution editorial page a “ghetto slut” and no one in his listening audience raises a protest. Rap music in today’s world denigrates womanhood and we raise not a protest. We live in a world where the abnormal has been made normal. We live in a world where those like Jerry Springer use unfortunate people for sport and profit and we not only laugh at it we tell our friends what a good show it was.

When our kids fail at school it’s the teacher’s fault. When our church doesn’t grow it’s the pastor’s fault. When no one shows up to volunteer it’s the faulty way the event was organized. When we elect idiots to public office it’s the fault of the voters not the ones who didn’t vote.

What has this world come to? Things have gotten so bad, I’m talking like my daddy!