Hats in Restaurants

One of my favourite episodes of the Sopranos (Season 1, Episode 9 "Boca") features a small scene in which Tony confronts a douchebag wearing a baseball hat in a restaurant.  It's impossible for me to count how many times I've wanted to do the exact same thing. Then again, I am Canadian.

I'm not a very formal person, but this act of poor manners drives me up the wall more than most. In fact, nothing says "douchebag" to me more than a jackass wearing his ball cap inside a restaurant (particularly if they are turned slightly askew and either barely sitting atop the cranium, or pulled down so far that you can't see the dude's eyebrows).  My folk's rules did not stop at restaurants.  They did not allow any hat wearing indoors at all: if you were in a building, you took your hat off.  As I recall, though can't say as I was observing too closely, pretty much all my friends had the same rules, and we all followed them without too much hardship, though I am calling bullshit on my dad's phrase: "if you wear your hat in the house, your hall will fall out".  I didn't, and it did anyway.  The restaurant rule was certainly in full effect for 'Generation X' (I can't believe I used that term!).  Why then have the children of this generation, and their subsequent offspring, forgotten this act of respect?

Self-awareness has been replaced by self-centredness.  You see it in the drunks at the hockey game spewing expletives out of control next to a family with kids.  You see it in the twenty-something mouth-breather that sits on the crowded bus/streetcar/subway while the grandmother and mother struggling to carry a baby hang on for dear life as they are forced to stand.  You see it in the driver who knows his lane is ending but is going to go right to the last second and cut in because he doesn't want to wait like everybody else.  Jackassery has become commonplace and tolerated by the public which is a damn shame, and it's only going to get worse.  If it only takes one generation to lose the manners they were taught by their parents, shudder to think what will come next.  Where's the head crusher from "Kids In The Hall" when you need him?