Can I add my voice to Graeme's excellent and vivid piece?
The compliant and cowed majority have ceded control to the bullying tendency. For example, on my journey home on the train to South East London, it is depressing to see how commuters now actively accommodate and work round those who impose themselves unthinkingly on what is a communal space, effectively taking it over and diminishing everybody else in the process. For such individuals it’s now de rigour to stake out a space by putting their feet up on the seat opposite. This increasingly common and apparently victimless practise is in fact one which combines all the worst aspects of anti-social behaviour: it is utterly selfish in the context of a public place, it implies a complete disregard for fellow travellers, and a contempt for the person who will have to sit where dirty shoes have been.
In our new universe, if asked to remove his feet, it is the bully who looks utterly offended – insulted that he is being shown such disrespect. If he complies, he will, in his myopic view, look silly in the eyes of others. On a couple of occasions I have tentatively asked for feet to be taken off the seat, only to be told how fucking rude I was, and asked who the fuck did I think I was. This was then followed by a mobile phone conversation during which these points were made again, loudly, so that my humiliation could be further drawn out.
On neither occasion, I might add, did anyone else back me up. Those who have not fully got to grips with the extent of social breakdown would like to explain this lack of support by referring to a traditional British desire not to make a scene or create a fuss. It’s a nice idea but it no longer plays: the other cheek is now turned out of fear rather than embarrassment. And it is justified; verbal abuse is bad enough for most people but there is a genuine threat of possible physical violence which they now have to take into account. Adult men have, after all, been kicked senseless for less. In August 2007, Roger Hare, a 62-year-old grandfather, was battered and knocked out of a train carriage and left in a coma on a life support system after asking a 20 year-old man to move his feet. At the subsequent trial, the young man pleaded self-defence.
Onlookers in such situations feel unprotected should anything like this happen in front of them, and so are frozen into inaction. Whether it is intrusive dirty shoes on a train seat, or at the other of the anti-social scale, having to endure a list of social plans being made by mobile at full volume for the benefit of those forced to listen, the only realistic course of action for most people at the moment is to suffer it.
