Are basic conventions now relics of the past?

My wife and I and 374 mosquitoes decided to go for a walk around the neighborhood before the sun went down yesterday so that we could get a little bit of exercise and enjoy one of Georgia’s approximately 13 days of fall. 

Because our neighborhood in Perry, Georgia, has grown about eight-fold in the eight years that we’ve lived in it, we can now get in a 2-mile walk without even walking every street. I’m not sure if I lose any weight on these walks, but I did lose about a pint of blood to the skeeters — who, by the way, do gain weight on these walks. Go figure.

I don’t know how far our usual path is as the crow flies, but if the crow walked with us, he would find it to be about 2 miles. Unfortunately, it turns out to be about 2.1 miles because so many of our neighbors don’t know that you’re supposed to walk against traffic when you don’t have sidewalks — which means walking on the LEFT side of the road.

We can’t walk without the danger of head-on collisions with other walkers who think they are supposed to go with the flow of traffic, as if they are on a bicycle. Maybe all of our neighbors are British. I know most of them lean to the far right, so maybe that’s it. Or, more likely, folks just don’t know some of the basic stuff I learned as a kid and mistakenly thought others have been taught, as well.

It makes for a slightly more aggravating walk, not to mention my pet skeeters are too fat with my blood toward the end of our walks to do much dodging of other pedestrians.

I’m not here to judge, though. I’m a happy-go-lucky, whatever you wanna do kind of guy. You wanna crash head-first into me, well, you do you. I’ll just get up, smile, and help you to your feet and say, “Bless your heart” — Southernese for “moron.”

So, just in case you never heard the basic rule here: You walk on the left against traffic, and you ride (including bikes) on the right with traffic.

I wonder what other rules and norms I was taught might not be as widely known as I thought. Such as:

• Don’t hit girls. Ever. Never have. Never will. Of course, I learned that as a boy. I assume that if you are a girl yourself, you’re allowed to flail away as you wish.
• There are two sides to every story. This was re-hammered home during my journalism days. It doesn’t mean one side is right or the other is wrong, but no issue can be fully understood when viewed from just one side or from within a bubble.
• When an older person does not have a place to sit, you give up yours and offer it to them. Only problem is that I’m now at an in-between age where some polite young folks look at me and begin to wonder if they should let me have their seat. While I appreciate the gesture, I politely tell them, “Mind your own dadgum business, whippersnapper! I ain’t old!”
• Don’t trespass on other people’s property. This has definitely gone by the wayside in this day of so many folks having ATVs and believing they have some inalienable right to cut up your property on them without repercussions. It’s definitely an issue in my area.
• Drivers, use your blinkers. Again, this is a huge problem near my neighborhood in Perry. There’s a tremendously busy intersection (Perry Parkway and Kings Chapel Road, site of many future accidents in this unchecked growth area) where you will often find yourself across from someone who is turning left but doesn’t signal it. So, you wait for them to go straight. And wait. Then they get impatient waiting for you and turn left. And then you lay on the horn and wave them farewell with your best finger. I know you know where you are going, but you don’t know that I don’t know where you’re going. It’s not hard.
• Don’t pick on people smaller than you. We had two kinds of bullies when I went to school. One was the big guy who only abused smaller people. I considered them weak and insecure. The others were little fellers who were always starting something. While some of these little fellers annoyed me like gnats, I at least had a tiny sliver of respect for them for being able to punch up instead of down. As an average-sized guy who wasn’t needy and didn’t require a lot of attention, I just decided to bully nobody.
• And I was always taught that honesty was the best policy. Years later, I was turned down for a job because of one credential I did not possess, and I was honest on the application about it. It was the sole reason I didn’t get it. And the man who taught me to be honest said, “You should have lied.”

I guess some of these norms and rules are flexible, such as texting while walking. I say it’s OK, so long as you do it while walking toward an open manhole.