The title of this blog is also the title of a 1967 film, starring Spencer Tracy, Sidney Poitier, Katharine Hepburn, and Katharine Houghton. The film, which garnered ten Oscar nominations and two Oscar wins, depicts a dinner party at which a white young woman introduces her would-be black fiancé to her parents over a dinner at her parents’ house.

While the film was definitely ground-breaking when it was made and released, times have changed, and, while cross-cultural marriages are far more common and legally accepted (which they were not in 17 states when the film was released), one other aspect of American life has changed even more than that – the very idea of having friends and/or acquaintances over to dinner.

Until 1975, half of Americans said they entertained guests at their home every month, but then Americans stopped, or slowed, having parties. From 1975 to 1998, the share of Americans who gave or attended a monthly dinner party declined by half, down to sixteen percent of families, and the number saying they never entertained people at home tripled. Since 1998, the giving or attending a dinner at someone else’s house has dropped by another twenty percent.

My wife and I have experienced this trend personally. When we first moved to Cedar City, even as comparative newcomers, we were invited to dinner parties, and we had quite a number of parties for others. Over time, that’s changed.

We still give dinner parties for friends, but we’ve noticed that only two other couples that we know regularly host such parties, and we’ve gotten the impression that some people we’ve invited have politely declined. Some gentle investigation has revealed that it’s not just us they’re declining, but that they also aren’t giving dinner parties for anyone.

So, it wasn’t exactly a surprise to read in a recent issue of The Atlantic that this trend is nationwide, and the number of those families/individuals who host dinner parties is continuing to decrease, as are other forms of interpersonal socializing.

Perhaps it’s that throwing a dinner party takes forethought, planning, preparation, and effort, and expense, and most Americans are overscheduled. Or perhaps, as a society, dinner parties are now outdated or passe, but whatever the reason… as a society we could use more dinner parties and less politics.

Congress may well consider and possibly pass legislation making Daylight Savings Time the “standard” time for the United States — again.

Too many people have forgotten (or never knew) that the US has tried year-around DST twice before, once during WW II and again in 1974. And each time, once was enough. Now, it appears that another generation will try again.

The problem here isn’t Daylight Savings Time or Standard Time, but Americans looking for the perfect single answer. The current compromise actually works better than either DST or ST being mandated year around.

With year-round DST school children in much of the nation would be going to school in the dark, as well as a greater number of workers heading to their jobs.

This tendency to seek the single perfect answer goes far beyond the question of DST or ST. It crops up in many places, if you just look. Education is infamous for seeking the “single perfect answer,” by insisting that children either be taught to read through either the phonics or “whole language” approach. Studies have shown that phonics is better for most, but far from all children, but that controversy still simmers… along with quite few other “single” mandated policies and procedures.

Abortion is another issue we continue to fight over what law should be the single “right” legal way to govern abortion, a fight that was rekindled by the Supreme Court’s rejection of Roe v. Wade (which represented what seemed to be an acceptable compromise).

So… will Congress force year-round DST to avoid the twice-yearly (and comparatively minor) discomfort of changing clocks and send millions of school children out in the dark in a vain effort to find another single perfect answer?

There’s definitely an anger problem in the United States today, from the President all the way down. There’s also an associated “stupidity” problem. That’s because, as I’ve mentioned before and elsewhere, anger and arrogance make people stupid, particularly the President (who believes everyone else is stupid even as he takes stupid actions).

At least some of the current anger, from what I see, arises from an attitude that can be described as a “are you so stupid that you can’t see” mindset, often fueled in part by stress. But it’s often not so much as willful stupidity as ignorance, either honest or willful. Sometimes, we don’t want to know, and sometimes we really don’t know all that we should.

A great number of people with very firm beliefs are so convinced that they’re right, and that anyone who doesn’t see things the way they do must be stupid. The problem here is that beliefs tend to be based on emotions and feelings and, at times, on the selective use of facts or on facts that only apply to certain segments of the population.

A variation of this came up in the previous blog post, when a reader stated that it was nonsense to make value judgments on the worth of others based on what clothes they wear, and another got angry when I said that such judgments weren’t nonsensical in the real world because such judgements are still made and have consequences. The fact is that both can be true.

On the surface, there shouldn’t have been such a reaction over apparel. The fact that there was suggests that a lot more is going on. The majority of Americans are unhappy with the President and both political parties. That’s hardly surprising when the cost of living is going up for everyone, and when the cost of higher education, the supposed ticket to personal prosperity, is at an all-time high and when an increasing percentage of graduates can’t pay off the student loans it took to get that education or can’t obtain the funding to buy a house.

Domestic violence has increased, mainly among adults in the 18–34-year-old age group, not coincidentally, the age group hit hardest by economic shortfalls. The adverse economics aren’t as likely to hit a professional family in their forties or fifties nearly so hard. But they’re still there and create the stress that can fuel anger.

Increases in road rage incidents continue, and that’s definitely a case where rage makes one stupid – you’re going to shoot and possibly kill someone for cutting you off, and spend years in jail or thousands of dollars avoiding it to save a few minutes?

I don’t have an answer for the increasing anger, except to say, take a long look at those who make you angry before you lash out… and it wouldn’t hurt to consider the costs of that anger.

And, at the same time, I can see that doing either is getting harder and harder as personal and societal stress levels continue to increase.

A line in a reader response caught my attention.

“Not everyone can afford those better clothes and the idea that they were lesser because of it was nonsense back then just like it is now.”

The fact is that while clothes do not make the person, they do reflect, to a certain extent, where a person stands in society. All societies throughout history have employed certain aspects of human representation to reflect where people stand in that society, whether those aspects are tattoos, hairdos, the size of ear lobes, styles and amount of expensive clothing, or something else.

Clothes have certainly played that role in western European culture, as have they in technologically advanced far eastern cultures and others as well.

Admittedly, all these forms of persona self-statement and/or representation effectively rest on comparative economic or social/religious position, but they’re far from nonsense, because the people with power in complex, materialistic societies do want to distinguish themselves from people who they believe are lesser. While one could even make the argument that “clothes competition” is a far less wasteful use of wealth and power to gain or demonstrate position, the problem is that the mega-wealthy simply escalate the level of “display” into the mega-mansions and mega-yachts now in vogue.

There’s also a reason why soldiers wear uniforms, or why students in some elite private schools do as well, and it has to do with removing clothing as a weapon of overt social positioning.

I’d agree that that greater or more extensive display hardly measures human worth, but it does measure economic success… of someone, even if the wealth is inherited.

But to say that better clothes as a display of wealth, power, and position is nonsense shows a lack of understanding of culture and human nature.

I can recall when I was a teenager – more than sixty years ago – my mother telling me that men should not go downtown [in Denver] without wearing a coat and tie, preferably a suit and tie, and that women should always wear gloves and a hat. Jeans were not allowed in public schools, and most private schools required either uniforms or had strict dress codes.

There were written invitations for dinners and parties, and those invitations required written replies either accepting or declining the invitation.

Police officers, teachers, doctors, and even lawyers were respected, as was age. And back then almost 70% of Americans could afford to buy a house (unlike the 43% today).

Then, during and after the end of the Vietnam War (and it was a war) matters changed swiftly, especially for social mores.

When I first went to Washington as a legislative assistant to a newly elected Congressman in 1973, I was twenty-nine, and almost all the Congressional staff directors were men (and a very few women) in their forties and fifties, if not even older. Ten years later, at thirty-nine, I was one of those staff directors, and most of the staff directors were my age, if not younger.

All of that is a form of nostalgia and ignores some very basic ills in American society at the time. Women and minorities effectively had far, far fewer rights than white males, and in parts of the South blacks had almost no rights at all (and we still haven’t gotten where we should be). The air was close to unbreathable at times in most major cities, and the water in most lakes and rivers undrinkable and unswimmable. In the 1960s, cars were still deathtraps in accidents.

But back then, people talked to each other and knew their neighbors. And they could talk to people who had different politics and religion. Now, it seems that far too many Americans live in self-selected internet bubbles with increasing intolerance of those who believe differently. Too many also ignore invitations without declining or show up without accepting.

We also have increasing amounts of violence by people who act as though the world should bend to their whims or desires. Road rage was essentially unheard of in the 1950s or 1960s. Shooting someone for “dissing” has also become more and more common.

What’s also been forgotten is that the way people dress reflects a certain amount of respect – or lack of it – for others. Wearing pajamas and flipflops on an airplane or sweaty gym clothes to a restaurant isn’t only poor taste and possibly unsafe, but it’s disrespectful to others, an arrogation of narcissism, if you will.

No, the past wasn’t wonderful, by any stretch of the imagination, but it seems like we’ve shed the good along with the bad, and that’s not the way to build a future.