Basic Courtesy

My Momma taught me basic courtesy. Here in the Deep South, there are certain basic courtesies that have been taught over the years. The list is too long to articulate here, but that doesn't change the requirements. There are certain societal courtesies that show if a person is skilled in the social graces.

One of those rules is very simple. If a person writes you a letter, you are bound by convention to respond to that letter. I'm not certain how email falls on the scale, because much of what I receive in my inbox is spam, unsolicited mail that is not of a personal nature. I routinely delete spam. Some of my email is unsolicited communications from readers, commenting on posts here or articles I've written for my other website. I make a dedicated effort to reply to those emails.

Under the rules as I was taught, to fail to respond to a letter is rude. A corollary to that rule is that a gentleman is never rude accidentally.

In the last post, I noted that I had written my Congresscritters a letter and that Senator Vitter had responded. Congresscritter Alexander and Congresscritter Landrieu have not yet responded. In comments, Oyster reflects that Congressman Jindal has not responded to a missive filed in April.

At my parents knees I was taught that nobility is defined by a person's actions, that great privilege demands great responsibility. The closest thing we have to a ruling class is our elected officials, who, by their very nature, are our ruling class. However, the Founding Fathers required that they work for us; that we could send them packing through the ballot box. Their oath is to the Constitution, but their fealty is to the people who put them in office, the voters.

When a Congresscritter fails to respond to one of my letters, I can only surmise one of two things: 1) they think my letter is spam, an unsolicited communication of no value. If they believe this, they are wrong. Their job is to gauge the feelings of their constituents and reflect those constituents to Congress. They may disagree with the voters on particulars of issues, but they should at least have the courtesy to respond to the constituents. They are not a ruling class, they are representatives of a section of this nation. They are servants of the greater whole. Or, 2) they have no basic courtesy, no understanding of the social conventions. If they are accidentally rude, they have no business representing me. If they believe they are too good to respond to my (or Oysters) letters, they have no nobility.

And they wonder why we hold them, generally, in such contempt.