Courtesy is Contagious

June 27, 2000

In an apartment building on 170^th and Fort Washington Avenue, there is a sign requesting that residents not throw dirty diapers out of their windows and into the courtyard below.

170^th and Fort Washington Avenue is smack dab in the middle of Washington Heights. It is a poor neighborhood. It is a Dominican neighborhood. It is a neighborhood under-served by overcrowded, substandard public schools.

As I stood looking at this sign, I wondered which of these factors made it necessary to ask people not to dispose of dirty diapers by throwing them out of the window. More accurately, I was wondering what kind of person would think hurling heavy Huggies out of the window was an acceptable means of waste management.

Is it the poor person who chooses to create his own squalor? Perhaps. But then I remembered some of the other lower-class neighborhoods I’d walked through that, in relative New York terms, were pretty clean. If memory serves me, they were Chinese and Eastern European sections of town.

So maybe it was a Latin thing. In the wake of the recent Puerto Rican terrorist attack in Central Park, it’s tempting to draw sweeping conclusions about those from the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. But I live in a mixed Puerto Rican and Dominican neighborhood in Jersey City and I’ve never seen a sign asking me to refrain from pitching putrid Pampers from my window to the street below. In fact, my street is very clean, due in large part to the house proud folks who tend their gardens and sweep the sidewalks every morning and afternoon.

Perhaps then, it is the educational background. Maybe a person who never finished high school or got a chance to see a bit of the world is unaware that throwing dirty diapers into a communal courtyard is not what most people do in a civilized country. But then I realized that even my dog tries to cover his own poop by kicking dirt on top of it. And if a dog can recognize a certain standard or decorum, then even the dimmest among us ought to be able to as well.

No, I decided, it’s not the poor guy who throws his baby’s shit into the street; it’s the rude guy. It’s not the Puerto Rican who harasses women in the Park; it’s the rude guy. It’s not the dumb guy who plays his radio so that everyone can hear it, who smokes in the hallway of an apartment building, who screams across the subway platform to his friends, who hisses at every girl who walks by, or who revs his Harley while you’re trying to sit and enjoy a coffee at a sidewalk café. It is the rude guy. And there are rude guys everywhere.

If rude people move into a neighborhood, what occurs is "polite flight."

To dislike the poor or the uneducated or the people of a different hue is not morally right, nor is it a logically tenable position. But it is perfectly acceptable--even encouraged--to disdain rude behavior, to avoid rude neighborhoods, and to hope your child never marries a rude person.

As for my polite friends in Washington Heights who live in constant fear of being hit by falling feces: Set the example with your own kindness and invest in a beach umbrella.

Broadway Jim Sosnicky