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Notes -
Non-political topic—dog culture. For the holidays, I was in physical stores shopping. It amazed how many people brought their dogs. One had brought a big dog that when it went by someone the dog owner struggled to keep the dog from jumping on the other customer. Dogs were in the freaking grocery store.
To me, this is entirely unacceptable. Some people (yours truly) don’t much care for dogs as the barking can be disquieting. More to the point I was raised believing there was a time and place for everything. Stores were not dog places. Yet that has seemed to break down. My question is why.
Are dog people convinced that all humans love dogs (except for evil humans) and therefore there ought not be a problem? Do they simply not care about old norms?
The general feeling I get (not a dog owner myself, FWIW) is that people have been conditioned to think they are special in some way. Their dog (or kid, or whatever) is better than everyone else's. That mixed with a bit of main character syndrome and you get what we see now. Maybe this is what happens when you give everyone awards when growing up?
Another angle that would support this same outcome is that it seems to be considered rude to tell someone not to do something or that whatever they are doing is "weird." You make the accused a "victim," and suddenly, they have that as a bludgeon to wield against you. I'm not a proponent of bullying, but that tended to keep people more in line and enforced a sense of shared social norms.
I have no idea how to get back to "normal."
I think this is a rather localized phenomenon. I never see dogs* in stores where I live and, as a dog owner, the idea of wanting to take my dog with me to the store makes no sense. The only people I've met who do so seem to have picked the idea up living in the south western US (eg, CA, NV), either having grown up there or moved later in life, and people around here have no problem telling them to keep their dogs home.
*With the rare exception of seeing eye dogs and police dogs.
--supposedly from the rules of some Oxbridge debating society.
Further evidence that debators are far less clever than they think.
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