Cagle World

Wealth, fame and success still don’t make us happy — but strong relationships do.

That has been the consistent message from the Harvard Study of Adult Development — the longest-running scientific study of adult life in the world.

The study began in 1938, tracking the health and well-being of 724 young men — 268 Harvard College sophomores and 456 boys from some of Boston’s toughest inner-city neighborhoods. Researchers interviewed their parents, conducted medical exams and followed the participants closely for the rest of their lives.

Nearly 90 years later, researchers are now studying more than 1,300 of the original subjects’ offspring and their spouses. The findings remain rock-solid: good relationships keep us healthier and happier. Period.

Harvard psychiatrist Robert Waldinger, the study’s fourth director, summed it up this way in a Harvard Gazette interview: “Loneliness kills. It’s as powerful as smoking or alcoholism.”

And Americans are increasingly lonely.

A 2025 Pew Research Center survey found that 16 percent of U.S. adults say they feel lonely or isolated all or most of the time, and 38 percent say they sometimes feel that way.

So why do we ignore what we already know?

We chase success, more money and bigger houses stuffed with more things.

We’d rather scroll our phones than call our friends. We have more “virtual” connections than ever, yet people report feeling lonelier than ever.

Meanwhile, happiness — which might be sitting right across the dinner table — gets neglected.

The Harvard team found that it’s not the number of relationships that matters — it’s their quality. You can be lonely in a crowd. You can be lonely in a marriage. What counts is having even one or two people in your life you can rely on when everything goes sideways.

Relationships take time and effort — but the payoff is better sleep, better mental health, better physical health, stronger memory and longer life. The real fountain of youth isn’t bottled water with electrolytes — it’s having someone who will drive you to the doctor and stick by your side when you need help.

Think about your own happiest moments. They didn’t involve impressing people with a fancy job title or showing off a big new SUV.
No, your happiest memories involve the people who touch the deepest part of who you are: your spirit and soul.

The key to happiness: friends who make you laugh so hard your gut aches; relatives who sit with you when life hits you hard; loved ones who turn ordinary days into warm, lasting memories.

Here’s another kicker: fame and fortune often make happiness harder. When you’re rich and a bit famous, the people who want something from you multiply — but the people who are there for you, no strings attached, shrink.

You never really know who your true friends are until the money is gone.

If you want to be happier and healthier, put quality relationships first. Call your siblings. Meet a friend for lunch. Play cards with neighbors. Show up when someone needs you. Let others show up when you are in need.

Or to rephrase the great Kenny Rogers: All anyone needs to be happy is people to love, people to do things with and people to look forward to doing things with.

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Copyright 2025 Tom Purcell, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

See Tom Purcell’s syndicated column, humor books and funny videos featuring his dog, Thurber, at TomPurcell.com. Email him at [email protected].

Good grief.

Since 2020, “A Charlie Brown Christmas” has been gone from network television.

For 54 years, the special aired on CBS, then ABC, every December — and millions of kids made sure they were sitting in front of the TV the moment it aired.

My family followed the same ritual for years: sitting in our wood-paneled basement family room, we’d plug in the Christmas tree and turn off the lamps.

As the Christmas lights glowed softly, we’d smile as Vince Guaraldi’s Trio played “Christmas Time Is Here” while the Peanuts gang glided across the ice.

Though Charlie Brown is no longer on broadcast television, the truth is it was almost never broadcast at all.

When CBS executives screened the first cut, they hated it. They didn’t like the amateur voices of real children. They didn’t think audiences would understand or appreciate Guaraldi’s cool jazz. And they especially disliked Linus quoting Scripture in prime time.

But creator Charles M. Schulz refused to make a single change — and with the deadline fast approaching, CBS had no choice but to air it exactly as Schulz wanted it.

What happened next is legend: On Dec. 9, 1965, nearly half of America’s television sets — more than 15 million households — tuned in to watch.
The show delivered massive ratings every December for years — still ranking No. 1 among adults 18 to 49 in 2019, the last year ABC broadcast it.

We all identify deeply with Charlie Brown’s dilemma. He is depressed because everyone around him fails to see the true meaning of Christmas. Lucy complains that she doesn’t want toys or clothes — she wants “real estate!”

To resolve his depression, Charlie Brown throws himself into his work as the director of the Christmas play. But that soon falls apart, too.

Distraught, he follows a light in the east and finds his way to a Christmas tree lot. The only tree he can find is a small, sickly one. When he brings it back, the others mock him.

But then Linus comes to the rescue and tells the story of Christ’s birth from the Gospel of Luke: “Glory to God in the highest, and on Earth peace, goodwill toward men.”

Suddenly, the other characters are transformed. They decorate the tree into a thing of beauty and gather around Charlie Brown to sing a Christmas carol.

I know it’s ironic that a television show whose commercial sponsors have sold a lot of consumer goods — and whose rights were sold to Apple TV+ for huge dollars — would be noted for its anti-commercial message.

But it is — because Charles Schulz was a genius.

For 54 years, there was something very special about whole families gathering together at exactly 8 p.m. when the show aired every December — not scattered in separate rooms updating social media feeds.

For all the gains that technology — and streaming video — have brought us, this is one of our great losses.

Hey, ABC: Bring Charlie Brown back to broadcast. Restore that 8 p.m. family huddle under the Christmas lights — just as it should be.

Sure, Apple TV+ recently extended its exclusive lock on Peanuts through 2030 — and yes, it will offer the show for free a couple of days in December — but millions of Americans still long for that one-night-only family experience only broadcast TV can deliver.

Good grief.

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Copyright 2025 Tom Purcell, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

See Tom Purcell’s syndicated column, humor books and funny videos featuring his dog, Thurber, at TomPurcell.com. Email him at [email protected].

Americans are the most generous people on Earth.

After charitable giving dipped during the COVID years — when inflation, lockdowns and economic strain made it harder for average families to give — American generosity has rebounded.

In 2024, U.S. charitable giving reached $592.5 billion, climbing past pre-pandemic levels even after adjusting for inflation — encouraging news as another holiday season begins.

I first began exploring the myths and truths of American charity nearly 20 years ago after watching John Stossel’s classic 20/20 report, “Are Americans Cheap?”

Stossel showed how deeply generosity is woven into the American character. Even with massive government welfare programs, he reported then, Americans have always stepped up, giving directly to the people who need help the most.

We still do.

According to Stossel’s recent column in Reason, Americans continue to support charities that get measurable results, such as Student Sponsor Partners, which provides scholarships to low-income students.

Such groups offer the kind of practical, person-to-person charity Americans have favored for generations.

The pattern of giving has changed since COVID. During the pandemic, charitable participation dropped sharply among middle- and lower-income households.

Whereas 73 percent of Americans earning under $40,000 donated to charity in 2017, that number fell to about 56 percent during the pandemic.

Today, with groceries, rent, insurance and credit card costs far higher than they were just four years ago, many families simply have less room to give — yet Americans of modest means still give a larger share of their income than anyone else.

At the same time, affluent households are giving more than ever. Americans with a household net worth above $1 million or incomes above $200,000 are donating nearly 20 percent more than before the pandemic. Many are using donor-advised funds or appreciated stock to give strategically, which has helped shore up overall giving totals even as participation rates among average households lag behind.

In 2024, individuals gave about $392.5 billion, corporations added $44.4 billion and foundations contributed $109.8 billion.
People who attend weekly services are still four times more likely to give than those who do not, though inflation-adjusted religious giving has slipped slightly as fewer people participate in traditional congregations.

Still, no country comes close to American charitable giving. Recent comparisons from the Charities Aid Foundation and Johns Hopkins show the United States giving about $1,700 per person each year — more than three times the rate of other wealthy nations and up to ten times the levels in France, Germany and Italy.

Why? Because it’s who we are.

Nearly 200 years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville traveled the United States and marveled at how quickly Americans of every station formed voluntary associations — churches, schools and civic groups — to address needs in their communities.

In “Democracy in America,” he explained that this habit of joining together sprang from what he called “self-interest rightly understood” — the recognition that individuals advance their own well-being by actively helping one another rather than depending on a distant central government.

That remains true today for most Americans.

Even though government spending on social programs exceeds $1 trillion a year, private giving continues to flourish because most Americans still believe local volunteers and private community groups solve problems best.

That’s something to celebrate as we kick off the holiday season.

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Copyright 2025 Tom Purcell, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

See Tom Purcell’s syndicated column, humor books and funny videos featuring his dog, Thurber, at TomPurcell.com. Email him at [email protected].

Thanksgiving is a myth?

According to Smithsonian Magazine, our beloved holiday actually has two histories: one real and one largely made up. Naturally, we celebrate the made-up version.

Everything we know about the “first Thanksgiving” comes from two colonists: Edward Winslow and Gov. William Bradford.

In 1621, Winslow wrote a letter describing how the 52 surviving colonists held a feast after their first successful harvest. The governor sent out four men to hunt for fowl, and about 90 Wampanoag people joined in, bringing five deer of their own.

For three days, the two groups feasted together, giving thanks for the simple gift of survival in a harsh new world.

But here’s where things get interesting: The colonists didn’t eat turkey. The “fowl” Winslow mentioned was most likely geese or duck.

There was no cranberry sauce, either — settlers didn’t start boiling berries with sugar until about 50 years later — and certainly no mashed potatoes. Potatoes of any kind weren’t yet available in New England.

Stuffing and pie were also off the menu. Without brick ovens or leavened bread, the colonists made do with coarse cornmeal mush and flatbreads baked in clay pots or hot ashes. And while pumpkins were plentiful, the settlers didn’t have butter or flour to make pie crusts.

So what did they eat? Along with fowl and venison, they probably dined on grapes, plums, flint corn and seafood — lobster, crab and mussels.

Picture that spread and tell me the first Thanksgiving doesn’t sound like something catered by Long John Silver’s.
So why do our modern traditions — turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie — look nothing like the original feast?

For that, we can thank Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of a popular 19th-century ladies’ magazine.

Before Hale came along, Thanksgiving wasn’t an official holiday, and when people did observe it, the day was private and solemn. Hale spent years campaigning for a national day of thanks. In 1858, she petitioned the president to make it official. In 1863, Abraham Lincoln finally did so.

Hale also published countless recipes for turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie — the very dishes we now associate with the “first Thanksgiving.”

In doing so, she mythologized the holiday into the warm, cozy, turkey-and-pie celebration we cherish today — complete with the image of Pilgrims and Native Americans dining together in perfect harmony, passing gravy and good cheer across the table.

The truth, though, is that the relationship between colonists and Native Americans was complicated and often grim. In the decades that followed, tensions over land and resources led to violent conflict. The idyllic image of everyone sitting around a shared table in peace is, sadly, more myth than fact.

But maybe that’s beside the point. Regardless of how our Thanksgiving traditions were formed — and what’s fact and what’s fable — the heart of the day still rings true. It’s a moment to pause, look around and appreciate how blessed we are.

In any event, our Thanksgiving story is about 10 percent history and 90 percent early American “fake news.”

But who cares? It gives us a day to overeat and count our immense blessings.

That’s plenty to be thankful for.

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Copyright 2025 Tom Purcell, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

See Tom Purcell’s syndicated column, humor books and funny videos featuring his dog, Thurber, at TomPurcell.com. Email him at [email protected].

We got it in the early 1970s — a Kimball organ that sat in our living room for 20 years or more.

It had single buttons that played whole chords. Other buttons played cymbals, marimba and other rhythmic beats.

I spent hours playing the thing. My father, too — his fingers were so big he had trouble playing just one key at a time — played it often.

And at family gatherings, my mother and her siblings would stand around it for hours, singing holiday tunes and other well-known standards.

I had no idea then how technological innovation made our living-room organ possible.

In 1933, Laurens Hammond, an inventor and high-end clockmaker, began developing an organ designed to replicate the sound of a pipe organ.

Hammond’s very first organs consisted of spinning wheels — called tonewheels or tone generators — and lots of other electromechanical parts. The machines were extremely well built, and many are still functioning today.

By the mid-1950s, organ makers began replicating the organ sound with lower-cost vacuum-tube technology.

By the late 1960s, vacuum tubes gave way to lower-cost transistor technology. They enabled the development of compact integrated circuit boards — the electronic gizmos that made it possible to produce more sophisticated sounds, such as a marimba beat.

They also allowed organs to be produced cheaply.

And so it was that the 1960s and early 1970s became the heyday of the home organ. Hammond, a high-end organ maker, soon found competition from lower-cost producers such as Lowrey, Thomas and Kimball.

Most malls had an organ store staffed with organ-playing sales representatives. They seduced thousands of suburban dads, such as mine, into digging into their wallets to bring organ music into their homes — something that had been unimaginable to my father as he grew up during the Depression years.

To be sure, our old Kimball organ brought us many hours of amusement. As sophisticated as we thought it was in the 1970s, we would have been shocked had we known what organs would be able to do decades later.

Digital technology has revolutionized the organ, as it has everything else. Today, for significantly less than my father paid for our Kimball in the 1970s, you can buy a digital organ that produces incredible sounds.

If you’re traveling in Europe and come across a pipe organ in a medieval church, you can probably buy sampling software that allows you to reproduce its exact sound in your living room.

And now, artificial intelligence and quantum computing are speeding up innovation faster than ever.

Thanks to such advances, the same spirit of ingenuity that gave us the Kimball organ is now reshaping medicine, manufacturing and even the arts.

We’ve had so much technological innovation in America that we take it for granted — but we do so at our own peril.

Innovators and entrepreneurs are the lifeblood of our economy. We need their inventions, many of them not yet known, to resolve the multitude of challenges we face — and to produce the wealth we need to cover our sizable bills.

If America hopes to stay in tune with progress, we must do everything possible to unleash the productivity of our creative class — to help the next generation of inventors, dreamers and builders strike the right chord.

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Copyright 2025 Tom Purcell, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

See Tom Purcell’s syndicated column, humor books and funny videos featuring his dog, Thurber, at TomPurcell.com. Email him at [email protected].

Veterans Day reminds us to honor the men and women who served our country — men like Joe Horne.

I met Joe years ago at a neighborhood coffee shop. We shared many enjoyable conversations, which is how I learned about his incredible life.

A tailgunner in the Army Air Corps during World War II, Joe and his crew enjoyed 11 successful missions. They didn’t expect to survive their 12th: orders to bomb a heavily guarded munitions plant in Munich.

As they approached their target, Joe fought off German fighter planes, but heavy flak hit the plane hard. It lost altitude so fast its windows shattered and landing gear was destroyed.

Their only hope was to make it across the Swiss border for a crash landing.

As the plane’s belly hit the ground — as uprooted earth and stones whipped through the broken windows — the pilot told the crew to evacuate before the plane exploded.

Joe dived out a window and was bruised and cut as he tumbled along the ground — but he survived.

The Swiss detained him in internment camps in Adelboden for six months — camps, writes Cathryn Prince in “Shot from the Sky,” that were a dark secret of World War II.

So long as he did as told, he was free to move about the town. He learned to ski and even had time to date a Swiss girl.

But he and a few others crossed the line when they got into a fistfight with Nazi sympathizers. They spent 30 days in the Wauwilermoos military prison in Lucerne, where they received little food or water and regular beatings.

After his release, he and his crew were about to attempt an escape when word arrived that all Americans detained in Switzerland were being repatriated.

On leave in Pittsburgh, Joe attended a dance. He fell for a striking woman across the room — love at first sight. Her name was Dorothy Kvederis. He married her four years later.

Discharged in 1946, he joined the Post Office. After two and a half years of college at night, Joe suspended his studies. He was happy with his life.

By 1954, he and Dorothy had saved enough to buy a house — the house in which he’d live the rest of his life.

They were blessed with a daughter and two sons — a teacher, dentist and corporate executive, respectively.

He loved his job. For 40 of his 46 Postal years, he delivered mail in a predominantly Black section of Pittsburgh.

Despite numerous opportunities to take over cushy routes inside air-conditioned high-rise buildings, he loved his route and would give it up only when he retired in 1992.

He and Dorothy finally had time to enjoy life. They traveled. They attended church every morning. They spent time with family and friends.

Their carefree life ended on Oct. 4, 1992, when Dorothy suffered a severe stroke that left her partially paralyzed. For the next 14 years, Joe cared for her — often getting by on only a few hours of sleep — until her death in 2006.

Joe passed away in 2018 at 91, but my memory of him remains vivid.

He had a zest for living, a fine wit and he put a spring in the step of anyone lucky enough to cross his path.

He was never famous, powerful or rich — but here’s the truth about veterans like Joe: great civilizations are built on the shoulders of such giants.

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Copyright 2025 Tom Purcell, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

See Tom Purcell’s syndicated column, humor books and funny videos featuring his dog, Thurber, at TomPurcell.com. Email him at [email protected].

Halloween has lost its punch.

That’s according to pop culture expert Robert Thompson, trustee professor and founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University.

“The post-World War II years were the golden age of Halloween for kids,” Thompson told me when we first spoke in 2009, “a trend that continued into the 1980s. But in the early 1990s, Halloween was reclaimed by adults.”

Why the shift?

“Halloween became one of the last bastions of free expression for adults — the one day in which almost anything went,” said Thompson. “Adults could be a wise guy or do something outrageous they’d never do the other 364 days of the year.”

Thompson said adult costumes had generally satirized popular culture or current events.

In the 1990s, costumes mocked Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, O.J. Simpson in his white Bronco, and figure skater Tonya Harding, who hired a thug to whack Nancy Kerrigan in the knee.

Women wore ultra-skimpy nurse, cop and Playboy Bunny outfits, while men cross-dressed as Britney Spears, Cher and Madonna in her cone-bra corset.

Outrageous costumes continued to be the rage until about 2013, when — with the dawn of social media and smartphones — a backlash began.

In that year, one woman who posted photos of herself dressed as a Boston Marathon bombing victim — torn clothes, fake blood and a race bib — got blasted across social media and fired from her job.

Halloween’s “anything-goes” era began a rapid decline.

By 2017, Vox, The Atlantic and Good Housekeeping were scolding us for costumes that might “offend” someone, somewhere.

Dressing as a pregnant reality TV star was “body-shaming.”

Dressing as Hannibal Lecter wasn’t funny — straitjackets might “stigmatize mental illness.”

Dressing as a sexy nun, nurse or Playboy Bunny was called sexist and gross by Cosmopolitan — and don’t even think about dressing up as a geisha or a gypsy.

So what are the trends for 2025?

“We’ve entered a post-Halloween era,” Thompson told me last week. “When presidents, CEOs and influencers make daily headlines for doing things that would’ve been unthinkable a generation ago, every day feels like a costume party where someone’s blowing up a new norm.”

He pointed to the “No Kings” protests, where demonstrators dressed in inflatable frog and crown costumes to mock President Trump, showing that Halloween’s rebellious spirit is now routine.

“All the rules Halloween used to suspend for 24 hours are now broken 365 days a year,” he said. “The need for a single day of sanctioned transgression has vanished.”

This, combined with pop culture’s fragmentation, is driving a return to safer, more traditional costumes.

“If you dress up as Travis Kelce or Taylor Swift, half the room will love you and half will roll their eyes,” said Thompson. “But everyone knows Dracula.”

Indeed, 2025’s most popular costumes are nostalgic favorites — Superman, Batman, Spider-Man — from a time when we all shared the same stories.

Thompson warned that with transgression now part of daily life, Halloween has lost its role as a cultural pressure valve to release our darker impulses.

“When costumes, words and actions lose their power to shock,” he said, “some people feel they must escalate to violent extremes — stabbing, shooting or taking a life — just to get noticed.”

That’s the key takeaway from Halloween 2025: When every day is outrageous, nothing is.

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Copyright 2025 Tom Purcell, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

See Tom Purcell’s syndicated column, humor books and funny videos featuring his dog, Thurber, at TomPurcell.com. Email him at [email protected].

When I visited Ready.gov, I was taken aback by this jarring disclaimer:

“NOTICE: Due to the lapse in federal funding, portions of this website may not be updated … until after appropriations are enacted.”

Nobody outside of the Libertarian Party is a fan of the government shutdown, but Ready.gov’s winter-tips page (ready.gov/winter-weather) isn’t exactly evidence of our tax dollars hard at work.

Did you know that “winter storms can range from a moderate snow over a few hours to a blizzard with blinding, wind-driven snow that lasts for several days”?

News to me.

Or that “many winter storms are accompanied by dangerously low temperatures and sometimes by strong winds, icing, sleet and freezing rain”?

To get ready for ice, prepare an emergency kit that has “rock salt or more environmentally safe products” that the government recommends on the EPA website.

We’re told that our emergency kit should include snow shovels or other snow-removal devices.

Without government assistance, my mother created the world’s finest snow-removal kit. It included a shovel and my father.

Sometimes things can get so bad in the winter, we are warned, you may lose power and heat. If you have a fireplace, be sure to stock up on seasoned wood. (For the moment, the EPA still allows us to use our fireplaces.)

Once you have followed these groundbreaking government tips, you need to learn what to do during the storm.

The first thing the government recommends is to stay inside. That makes sense to me. We must fight the urge to lie in the yard in our pajamas covered with wet snow.

If you must go outside, however, “be careful walking on snowy, icy walkways” — because top government minds have determined that both are slippery!

The government warns us not to overexert ourselves while shoveling. That is sound advice. Overexertion while shoveling can, and does, lead to heart attacks, particularly in middle-aged fellows who are not in great physical shape.

Yet every year, we men, fully aware of the risk, overexert ourselves while shoveling — and one or two of us have heart attacks and end up on the local news along with interviews with medical experts who tell us we ought not overexert ourselves while shoveling.

Frostbite is a big worry. Symptoms “include loss of feeling” and a pale appearance in our fingers, toes, earlobes and nose.

I am no expert, but another symptom is that you are really cold, which is a good reminder that you should go inside the house where it is warm.

If you’re a critic of how big and wasteful our government has gotten — that we employ people to write tips so obvious a first grader could have written them — then you’ll thoroughly enjoy these insightful government tips:

CDC: “Wash your hands — with soap.”

IRS: “File your taxes to avoid penalties.”

TSA: “Prepare to be groped!”

Actually, the TSA doesn’t say that. They call it a “pat down.”

To the government’s credit, it does offer a few useful tips — such as leaving your water dripping so pipes don’t freeze and tying a bright cloth to your antenna if you’re stranded in your car.

For the most part, though, if you need to rely on the government for obvious tips on how to navigate everyday life, your worries are much greater than winter weather.

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Copyright 2025 Tom Purcell, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

See Tom Purcell’s syndicated column, humor books and funny videos featuring his dog, Thurber, at TomPurcell.com. Email him at [email protected].

It’s called “messy authenticity,” and it’s the latest trend to clearly demonstrate America has lost its collective mind.

Looking for a Maison Margiela sweater with unfinished threads and gaping holes? It’ll cost you nearly $1,500.

How about a designer purse with fringed eyelets, frayed material and uneven seams? That’ll be about $1,700.

How about a “Rag Chair” for your living room that’s stitched together with discarded fabric scraps? That will set you back about $4,000.

I first documented the “designs made to look imperfect” trend nearly 18 years ago. Distressed furniture was one of the first troubling examples.

As it went, people were bringing brand new chairs, tables and dressers into their garages, kicking and scratching the bejesus out of them, then covering them in a lumpy, blotchy paint.

My sister, an interior designer, told me that people did this because they wanted an antique look, but real antiques are hard to come. So they paid good money for brand new furniture which they spent hours making look tired and worn.

The blue jean trend was another regrettable example. In 2007, the owner of an upscale jeans store told me the jeans with holes and splattered paint were selling like hotcakes.

“People spend money on jeans with holes and paint on them?” I said.

“Yes, up to $700,” she said.

“But they have holes and paint on them!” I said.

“Yes!” she said.

She told me the best-selling jeans were either washed in dirt or smeared with grease — so that people who buy them can be as fashionable as the guy digging graves or changing fluids at the Jiffy Lube.

Since 2007 the trend for authentic-looking fake stuff has accelerated in some areas, but it is declining in others, and I think I know why.

As more Americans move to major metro areas — nearly 85 percent of us live there now — we’ve traded dirt, grass and sky for pavement, strip malls and cookie-cutter townhomes.

We work long hours in gray cubicles doing bland service work — keeping our personal observations and human emotions to ourselves out of fear that HR will write us up.

The farther we drift from hands-on living and the freedom to be ourselves, the more we long for authenticity of any kind — even messy authenticity that is totally fake.

Then again, more young people are walking away from college and paper-pushing jobs to become electricians, plumbers and carpenters. They’re rediscovering what we once called blue-collar horse sense — the joy of making and fixing things with your hands.

Our country was built by people who toiled with their hands. Ben Franklin started as a printer’s apprentice. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson farmed — most of the founders did.

Working daily in nature — wrestling with real problems out in the fields and the woods with the many animals they cared for — taught them humility, practicality and authenticity.

To that end, the return of young people to the trades gives me hope. The more that Americans fix and create things, the less we will desire fake authentic stuff.

One design trend offers hope:

The “working-stiff” jeans of two decades ago have become more refined — the holes are smaller, the dirt’s rubbed in more gently and the grease is applied in modest dabs.

It’s a start.

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Copyright 2025 Tom Purcell, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

See Tom Purcell’s syndicated column, humor books and funny videos featuring his dog, Thurber, at TomPurcell.com. Email him at [email protected].

Civility is making headlines again — that lack of it, that is.

Recent surveys by workplace-research firms, such as Sogolytics and the Society for Human Resource Management, suggest that nearly half of Americans have witnessed or experienced incivility at work.

Recent Pew Research Center surveys found that about one-third of Americans say they often encounter rudeness in public life.

The word civilitas — Latin for “the behavior expected of a citizen” — gives us “civility.” In ancient Rome, it meant the conduct that allowed people to live together without chaos.

By the 1500s, the Renaissance thinker Erasmus was teaching civility as moral discipline in his book “On Civility in Children.” His message was simple: manners are what make civilization possible.

A young George Washington embraced civility, hand-copying 110 rules as a teenager in colonial Virginia from a 16th-century French Jesuit manual, “Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation.”

As our first president, Washington understood that civility was more than politeness. It was the foundation of orderly self-government.
For generations, parents passed those lessons down. My parents surely did.

“Please” and “thank you” weren’t optional — they were mandatory. You didn’t start eating until everyone was served. You held doors open for strangers, waited your turn in line and treated others with the respect you expected in return.

Then came technology and new opportunities to be uncivil.

The telephone made it easy to hang up on people. The answering machine made it easy to ignore them. Caller ID let us screen them. Email made us blunt. Social media made us mean.

Why? A simple lack of looking our fellow humans in the eyes.

Psychology Today reports that a lack of eye contact is a major contributor to “online disinhibition” — the tendency to say things electronically you’d never say face to face.

When you don’t have to look someone in the eye — and live in toxic echo chambers online — you stop seeing others as human beings. The people you disagree with become villains.

The technology-enabled breakdown of civility has consequences. Judith Martin — better known as Miss Manners — warned us about them years ago.

Martin said manners are the philosophical basis of civilization — our shared language designed to keep our impulses in check.

She said that manners evolved to keep peace in close quarters — to prevent daily irritations from turning into altercations.

She warned that when people no longer fear being thought rude, hostility and violence will fill our civility vacuum — from airline brawls to school board melees to mob behavior in our streets and on our college campuses.

Still, there is a glimmer of hope.

Several recent studies show that prompts urging users to pause before posting cut offensive replies by about 6 percent — and that civility training and leaders who model courtesy still set the tone, both online and at work.

That’s a good start.

Here’s another: Let’s follow the “Rules of Civility” Washington copied and lived by almost 300 years ago.

Rule 73 is a good one: “Think before you speak; pronounce not imperfectly, nor bring out your words too hastily.”

If Washington were around today, I trust he’d be admonishing us to take a deep breath before chopping down other people’s cherry trees for the simple crime of disagreeing with us.

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Copyright 2025 Tom Purcell, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

See Tom Purcell’s syndicated column, humor books and funny videos featuring his dog, Thurber, at TomPurcell.com. Email him at [email protected].