As I do every year, I watched the Academy Awards with a few friends. We meet at one friend’s house, enjoy a potluck dinner and gab about the dresses, the emcee(s), the Academy winners and losers. This year had its usual fill of beautiful and not so beautiful moments. We can learn many etiquette lessons by watching the Academy Awards.  Here are my notes on the good, the bad and the ugly moments of this year’s show.

Let’s start with the “Bad”

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I recently wrapped up my 14 week kindness “class”. This class was offered to the general public by the Puget Sound Community School, a private school in Seattle for 11 to 18 year olds. The school founder, Andy Smallman, created the class “to start ripples of kindness that will be felt in far away places, touching others and creating even more kind acts.”

Each Sunday we were given assignments to perform that week. The assignments ranged from doing something kind for ourselves, because you can’t be kind to others if you’re not kind to yourself, to doing something kind anonymously to leaving something nice for someone to find, etc.

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I’ve been asked to teach a kid’s etiquette class to both boys and girls. As I’ve been putting together the curriculum, I had to pause when it came to teaching appropriate behavior for boys for treating girls and women in this modern day. I wondered should men still be expected to open the door for a woman, to pull her chair out, help her with her bags, walk on the street side of the sidewalk to protect her from splashes, etc.?

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I just attended a small business roundtable group which serves as a forum for entrepreneurs seeking business advice and mentoring. The facilitator couldn’t be there so we were on our own to lead the discussion with a couple of suggested topics. Unfortunately that led to trouble.

We started out talking about economic projections but a couple of people moved the discussion to politics. Only a few people participated in the political conversation and they all seemed to agree with each other. There seemed to be an assumption that we all felt the same way. I was very uncomfortable and I suspect I wasn’t the only one.

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I subscribe to a few different blogs of people I admire or enjoy. One recent blog post surprised me as it seemed out of character for this blogger. It was a bit like a brag about how busy he was and why it was making him a better person. He outlined minute by minute what he was doing one day. A few times the timeline included the statement that he was chatting with people while “picking off a few emails” or taking phone calls. He went on stating how full every minute was. Even when he was alone he was doing something – email, writing, etc.  He seemed exhausted by his life while also talking about how necessary it is to work like this because he’s “out to win.” [...]

It would be easy to assume civility is dead given the antics of a few people who should know better. Over the last week we’ve had a Congressman be disrespectful to the President, a tennis star show poor sportsmanship and a musician take away from another’s moment in the spotlight. What these three did was wrong and rude and lacked respect for others. It was enough to give anyone pause about where our country is headed. However, I think we are letting a few color the many and I argue there are so many gracious, kind and respectful people in this country, they just don’t get the coverage that the bad boys/girls do. [...]