My guest blogger, Cheyenne Beeman, is writing about manners and wondering “where have they gone?” It’s a part of my new series, which asks young adults to weigh in on today’s issues. Cheyenne writes:

urban-438393__180Last week, as I walked into a restaurant, I held the door open for someone. To my astonishment, she just walked by. She didn’t even say thank you!  I could not fathom doing that. That incident really got me thinking about how manners have changed over the years. Have we gotten too busy to mind our manners?

I come from a family where manners are taught at a very young age. If I didn’t say please or thank you, I was being disrespectful. I feel like in this day and age, we are taught to do whatever we want because in the end everyone is a winner anyways. I think a problem with today’s society is that we just do not care anymore. If we stop caring about the little things, like opening a door for someone or being respectful enough to chew with our mouths closed, how can we be expected to care about the big things?

I finish in saying this: Manners really have not changed much over the decades. All that has changed is our willingness to use manners and live by them. Can you imagine how different society and the world we live in would be if we just changed the way we looked at manners and embraced them?   Can you imagine how positively our outlooks on life and interactions throughout the day would change?