Why People Are Acting So Weird - Anal Schwabic Atlantic Bootlicking Garbage
Crime, “unruly passenger” incidents, and other types of strange behavior have all soared recently. Why?
By Olga Khazan
Everyone is acting so weird! The most obvious recent weirdness was when Will Smith smacked Chris Rock at the Oscars. But if you look closely, people have been behaving badly on smaller stages for months now. Last week, a man was arrested after he punched a gate agent at the Atlanta airport. (The gate agent looked like he was about to punch back, until his female colleague, bless her soul, stood on some chairs and said “no” to the entire situation.) That wasn’t even the only viral asshole-on-a-plane video that week.
In February, people found ways to throw tantrums while skiing—skiing. In one viral video, a man slid around the chairlift-boarding area of a Canadian resort, one foot strapped into his snowboard as he flailed at security guards and refused to comply with a mask mandate. Separate footage shows a maskless man on a ski shuttle screaming, “There’s nobody wearing masks on any bus in this goddamn town!” before calling his fellow passenger a “liberal piece of shit” and storming off.
"During the pandemic, disorderly, rude, and unhinged conduct seems to have caught on as much asbread bakingand Bridgerton. Bad behavior of all kinds —everything from rudeness and carelessness to physical violence—has increased, as the journalist Matt Yglesias pointed out in a Substack essay earlier this year. Americans are driving more recklessly, crashing their cars and killing pedestrians at higher rates. Early 2021 saw the highest number of “unruly passenger” incidents ever, according to the FAA. In February, a plane bound for Washington, D.C., had to make an emergency landing in Kansas City, Missouri, after a man tried to break into the cockpit."
Rudeness can be contagious. Porath has found that at work, people spread their negative emotions to their colleagues, bosses, and clients—even if those individuals weren’t the source of the negativity. “People who witness rudeness are three times less likely to help someone else,” she told me. She thinks people might be picking up on rudeness from social media and passing it on. Or they might be logging in to a Zoom meeting with their overwhelmed boss, getting yelled at, and then speaking a little more curtly to the grocery cashier later.
People are drinking more
People have been coping with the pandemic by drinking more and doing more drugs, and “a lot of these incidents involve somebody using a substance,” Humphreys said. “Whether they’re drinking before they get on the flight … A lot of auto accidents, including aggression-driven auto accidents, come from substances.”
Americans have been drinking 14 percent more days a month during the pandemic, and drug overdoses have also increased since 2019. Substance-abuse treatment, never especially easy to come by, was further interrupted by COVID.
Americans have also been buying more guns, which may help explain the uptick in the murder rate. Gun sales spiked in 2020 and 2021, and more people are being killed with guns than before. In 2020, police recovered nearly twice as many firearms within a year of purchase as they did in 2019—a short “time to crime” window that suggests criminal intent. “Put more plainly, thousands of guns purchased in 2020 were almost immediately used in crimes,” Champe Barton writes at The Trace. Though owning a gun doesn’t make it more likely that you’ll kill someone, it makes it more likely that you’ll be successful if you try.
We’re social beings, and isolation is changing us
The pandemic loosened ties between people: Kids stopped going to school; their parents stopped going to work; parishioners stopped going to church; people stopped gathering, in general. Sociologists think all of this isolation shifted the way we behave. “We’re more likely to break rules when our bonds to society are weakened,” Robert Sampson, a Harvard sociologist who studies social disorder, told me. “When we become untethered, we tend to prioritize our own private interests over those of others or the public.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2022/03/antisocial-behavior-crime-violence-increase-pandemic/627076/