Someone is giving me grief in comments for my aural abuse of metro bus passengers in defense of my kid.

And it’s got me thinking.

First, I’m a girl (you peeps might have noticed) and as a girl I am often given grief for my colorful language. So anyone who wants me to shut up and take a shit sandwich with a grin pisses me off. Cussing actually has sociological value. In the work place, cuss words are used to bond employees together over shared sentiments. Which is why it’s a double whammy when women are belittled for using the same kind of language as men.

But beyond that is this idea that politeness trumps humanity. Now I am a big one for manners. Manners are the little social rules that make society function. We wait our turn in lines, cover our mouths when we cough, don’t spit on the sidewalks. These are behaviors we have because it makes things work better. They differ from culture to culture (in Spain line-cutting is the only way to ever get through a line). But a majority of people in a place will understand what those unwritten rules are and follow them.

However, we have taken the rules for politeness into the extreme of apathy. Much like the asshole in comments, who thinks it is better to let doochebags get away with humiliating children than to offend bus riders with a 30 second take down of said doochebag, we have let inaction become the glue that holds society apart.

And in this case, it was just a dooche picking on a kid. But in other situations, like say the woman who was raped on a train platform while the guard sat in the guard booth and watched, that inaction has caused real damage. What if someone had thrown a public tantrum at the rapist dude before he actually got to the rape point. What if he had been publicly humiliated for groping or even just ogling the woman? Might we have stopped a worse abuse? Might we have stopped some of the watchers from thinking that kind of behavior is ok.

When you humiliate people for treating others badly, you make it harder for people to treat others badly. When you stand up for people, you make it easier for others to stand up. When you sit quietly on a bus and ignore assholes, you make it that much easier for them to be assholes.

In short, when you treat people like human beings, other people will treat them as human too. This is why it’s important for men to be vocal feminist allies and for whites to support people of color and for straights to push for gay marriage.

In WWII in a village in France, the local Huguenot minister treated Jews as humans. He and his congregation hid them, fed them, and kept them safe from the Nazis. The Nazis, seeing Jews treated as human beings instead of vermin, warned the minister before raids were about to take place.

When you treat people as human beings, it makes it easier for other people to treat them as human too. When you call out bullshit and hurtful behavior, you make it easier for other people to call it out too.

Inaction is not really politeness. We have to stop seeing apathy as good manners. We have to start treating people as human beings so we all can be treated as human beings. Stand up, yell at assholes, make a fuss and humiliate those who would do harm.