Shooting In Duncan, Okla.

"Believe It Or Not." as Ripley would say, there are people taught to be rude.  The image of these people is so strong that one hears "There goes the neighborhood" the moment one moves into a community where people don't think that rude is cool.

The rude-is-cool belief exists by commission or ommission in one-dimensional -- crude, rude -- neighborhoods where many mothers and fathers are loud and vulgar-mouthed around their children who grow up imitating them a nd passing this ignorant conduct on to other children.  We encounter them in schools, on school buses, public buses, in stores -- in fact, wherever we go because they believe that being rude is cool, that it gets them noticed, but only if they're more rude than the one trying to get noticed by being rude to them.

Sometimes some of these people can be so ignorant, existing in a state between low intelligence and no intelligence that they'll take a gun, get in a car and see a young athlete jogging down the street -- maybe even in a small Oklahoma town -- and they'll shoot him in the back, killing him.  That's what can happen when rude is cool leads a fool.