Respect for Respectable Ideas

I went out to breakfast on Sunday. I planned to fight the weeds in my garden in the afternoon, so I had on torn jeans. I was concerned that I would be out of place among the well-dressed Sunday public.

I was wrong. Jeans, hoodies, T-shirts, basketball shorts and camo were everywhere. My long-sleeve Levi’s shirt put me in the sartorial elite.

My expectations had been formed in another era, and I had not adjusted to the reality passing before my eyes. It’s not just dress styles that have changed. The whole idea of respecting Sunday has been shifting during my lifetime.

Membership in a religious congregation fell from three-quarters of Americans to just over half since the 1950s. Going to church has fallen slowly, too, from about 50% to a low of 36% last year.

Following public behavior, American governments have gradually stopped enforcing Christian practice. There was no baseball in Boston on Sundays until 1929, and then Red Sox could not play in Fenway on Sundays, because there was a church nearby, and had to play in the Boston Braves stadium.

Forbidding the sale of liquor on Sundays lasted much longer, into the 21^st century in many states. The lingering effort to keep Sunday respectable by not selling disrespectful alcohol continues in less and less rational forms, such as the prohibition in Illinois of retail alcohol sales until 11 AM, except in Chicago, where only the big supermarkets can sell alcohol after 8 AM. You also can’t buy a car on Sunday, but you can get gas, get your car fixed, and buy a motorcycle. Of course, you can buy guns on Sunday.

The most socially significant change on Sundays is the intrusion of retail commerce, led by the big national chains trying to put local business out of business. Respect for a common day of rest is gone.

Why was I concerned anyway, aren’t torn jeans fashionable? Just check the internet. You can get jeans with “distressing and a frayed hem for an extra edge of attitude” for $51, marked down from $80, or many varieties of torn jeans from Nordstrom’s for over $200.  “Gentlemen’s Quarterly” offers a style guide to ripped jeans, which declares that more than 2½ tears is trying too hard. Yves St. Laurent offers ripped men’s jeans for $750.

Big city folks putting on the Ritz usually get others to tear the jeans. My small-town students mostly do their own ripping.

But fashion rarely imitates life. Jeans with grass and dirt stains, ragged holes at the knees and obvious wear don’t pass GQ’s test and aren’t hawked on the internet.

So what do the artificial holes mean? Tearing jeans ruins them for work. Eventually they no longer can do their job of protecting the body from the rigors of dirty work. I don’t understand those carefully planned tears, but I don’t think they represent respect for the physical labor that causes real holes.

Maybe respect is what has really changed. Respect for Sunday, respect for work, respect for the ideas and customs which were dominant when I grew up. We see the evidence of new definitions of respect and disrespect in the news every day.

Some of the respect revolution has been welcome. Men generally exhibit much more respect for the integrity of women’s bodies, so now violators get slapped in the face, not on the back. But it will take more than a few outraged slaps to make any further progress.

Disrespecting black people is also no longer normal. Roger Angell tells the story of the presence on the Harvard lacrosse team of a black student in 1941, which caused the US Naval Academy team to refuse to play, until the Harvard athletic director overruled the coach and sent the student home. The President of Harvard apologized to the Naval Academy commander for the inconvenience.

There is still plenty of gender and racial disrespect across America, but the change has been remarkable.

Some respect shows disrespect for others. The conventional respect for Christian Sunday was not matched by any public respect for Jewish Friday evening and Saturday. America may be a majority Christian nation a bit longer, but government Christianity is no longer a virtue in the democratic US.

My torn jeans on Sunday are not a sign of disrespect, but an expression of a different culture, one of many that have combined to make America. We don’t need to all respect the same things. Respecting our diversity means understanding that Americans will respect different things.

Some traditional forms of respect are now controversial. Our public space is torn about the idea of respecting the Confederacy. Respect of equal rights leads to disrespect for slavery and its defenders. The oldest US universities, so disrespected by conservative pundits, are among the leaders in examining how they profited from and strengthened slavery. What conservatives call political correctness, I call honesty about the past.

Respect is good, when it comes out of the broadest respect for our fellow humans of all kinds.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, October 24, 2017