What has caused New Yorkers to exhibit poor behavior recently?

The man who wakes me in the middle of the night rifling through the recycling bin outside our building has become a total jerk.

He no longer bothers to close the lid, leaving it flung open and crushing the flowers on the railing behind it.

If that weren’t bad enough, he scatters the unredeemable recyclables all over the ground, making a complete mess and violating the long-unspoken rule of tidiness between local garbage sifters and the residents they rely upon. 

The uncouth can collector isn’t the only example of bizarre, petty anti-social behavior I’ve noticed around town.

Marijuana smoke chokes you around every corner.

A plant thief is on the loose in my Brooklyn neighborhood, where businesses have posted photos of a woman going around snatching irises and geraniums from outside mom-and-pop shops. 

The other day my own barber, where I’ve been a loyal customer for years, asked me to leave mid-haircut and come back in an hour.

He said had an errand to run. 

“You want me to walk home with half a haircut and return in an hour?” I asked, completely befuddled. 

“You can borrow a hat,” he shrugged. While he lost a faithful customer that day, I couldn’t understand in what universe this sort of behavior was acceptable and why it seemed to be on the rise everywhere. My haircut, after all, only takes 20 minutes. 

I wondered if I was just getting soft until one night over drinks a friend from Queens confirmed what I’d been noticing. 

“Everyone is so much ruder and more disrespectful lately,” he said, “waiters, delivery boys, even my dentist.” His theory: lockdown scrambled our brains and society was suffering from a sort of long-COVID agoraphobia, or psychopathy. I wasn’t so sure. The crash in basic decency is playing out all over the country, not just in totalitarian Democrat fiefdoms like New York where there’s a higher percentage of anti-humanists still scuttling around with their little masks on, grasping for a return to more restrictive times.

Last week, Duke University graduates walked out of a commencement address by comedian Jerry Seinfeld, presumably because he’s Jewish.

Squatters from New York to California are emboldened to plant their flags in other people’s homes, and then have the property owners arrested when they come knocking. 

Recently a mother went viral on TikTok after she sent another mother a $36 bill for a playdate.

The tab included $3 for Goldfish crackers, $1 for a pump of hand soap the other mother’s child used to wash his hands, and $5 for electricity — because the kids played a video game. 

More frightening, the empathy vacuum has led to a spike in casual violence as well. While crimes like murder and rape are down in New York City there’s a new trend of derelicts sucker-punching strangers on the sidewalk — mostly women but a few male celebrities have fallen victim, too, including 66-year-old actor Steve Buscemi just last week.

The same thing happened to actor Rick Moranis in 2020. 

The rudeness free-for-all is a product of living under leadership that blithely humiliates and deceives the people they’re elected to govern.

What is uncontrolled spending on foreign wars, stagnant wages, a preoccupation with DEI, and the migrant crisis — with its billions of dollars shelled out to criminal aliens committing asylum fraud — if not a clear message to taxpaying citizens that you do not matter. 

That, combined with bail reform, wastelands of homeless encampments in our cities, and an unchecked fentanyl epidemic, delivers the same pronouncement: if the government so clearly doesn’t care about its people and their basic wellbeing, why should anyone else?

The most volatile and developmentally stunted members of our crumbling society have taken note, whether it’s by flinging your garbage on the ground searching for a nickel’s worth of aluminum or scowling under a man bun as they take your dinner order. 

Even as Democrat leaders like Mayor Eric Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul continue to demean the electorate by flying off to Europe for taxpayer-funded vacations (under the guise of cultural exchange programs or climate summits or whatever), the NYPD is under increasing pressure to reinstate broken windows policing.

It’s not a cure but may send a message to criminals and jerks alike: being courteous for once is not a crime — you’ll probably even be happier if you do.