The election’s over, and Miss Manners wants to Make America Nice Again

Listen up, America.

Stop trolling people on Twitter who voted for Donald Trump. Take a break from unfriending people on Facebook who supported Hillary Clinton.

Miss Manners has something to say.

She’s bothered by how we’ve treated one another this election season. We’ve been rude, disrespectful, nasty and unkind — we’re still doing it, go check your Twitter feed — and the nation’s etiquette queen wants us to stop it.

She’s on a new mission. Just call it Make America Nice Again.

“Respect for people who have different opinions or different ideas or different backgrounds is an essential American value. And it’s in danger of getting lost,” the national columnist, whose name is Judith Martin, said Thursday in Kansas City at the headquarters of Andrews McMeel Universal, which syndicates “Miss Manners.”

Two aspects of this unparallelled campaign helped set an acrimonious tone, Martin said.

“One is the idea that expressing all your feelings, whether they are presentable or not, is a healthy, good idea,” she said.

“Another one is the contentiousness and the entertainment value of an election where there is all the back and forth and it’s exciting to watch. And it’s drama, but it’s not the way we want to live, to live with that kind of drama.

“So, we’ve had our excitement, and it is time to settle down and be one country and behave ourselves.”

Martin’s daughter and column coauthor, Jacobina Martin, said the election has been “Topic No. 1” for them in recent months. Many have sought their guidance on how to deal with family members supporting the other guy, and woman.

“It’s like a Civil War era,” said Martin. “Some people are on one side and some people are on the other, and yet you are family, and yet you have friends.”

Those political differences threaten to make Thanksgiving this year even more uncomfortable than it usually is in some households, they worry.

“It’s not new that you always have people in your family with different political sides,” said Jacobina, who teaches classes at Chicago’s famous Second City. “But we hope with better-behaved families you’re like: ‘Well it’s family. We go on.’

“And I think that’s what the country needs to do right now. We may have different political differences, but we still have to sit next to each other at the holiday.”

Within hours of Trump’s win this week, people began announcing online that they are skipping the turkey dinner this year. They don’t want to break bread with good ol’ Uncle Bud who voted for Trump, and they don’t want to pass the gravy to Aunt Tillie, who cast her ballot for Clinton.

“What a shame that is,” said Martin, “because those are your relatives. Those are the people you presumably love at some level, and if you can’t restrain yourself to treat them with respect, how are you going to get along with anyone?”

People are mistaken if they think following the rules of etiquette suppresses healthy conflict, Martin said.

“It’s the opposite,” she said. “It enables you to express it and to air conflict, and to air your differences. Because if you are just calling people names and saying obscene things, and yelling at one another, no ideas get expressed, nothing gets settled.

“That’s not the way progress is made. Progress is made when we listen to one another, when we restrain our uglier impulses and treat one another with respect. And then we work out some kind of livable situation for all of us.”

Martin wrote her first advice column in 1978 when she talked her editors at The Washington Post into it.

“Ben Bradlee came out of his office one day and said, ‘OK, who’s going to do the etiquette beat?” she joked.

“I mean, I had to talk them into this. They thought, ‘What a terrible idea.’ The word ‘etiquette’ was not even in use at that time. That’s something from the Victorian era where they had nothing better to do because sex hadn’t been invented yet, so they thought up little gotcha rules to torture one another.”

It turns out that stories of how she named herself “Miss Manners” are true.

“Of course I did! Of course I did!” she said.

She wasn’t sure when she started that people would even be interested in talking about good manners. “I wanted to do it because I thought it was funny,” she said.

“Etiquette was almost a forgotten idea then. But for that very reason, the ’70s and ’60s, the do- your-own-thing, everybody improvising ... I apparently tapped into this hunger that people had for a little civility. These things go back and forth, and this is what I’m hoping now.”

This story was originally published November 10, 2016 at 4:48 PM with the headline "The election’s over, and Miss Manners wants to Make America Nice Again."