Opinion: When the answer could be a bullet, no one will ask the question

Editor’s Note: Sara Stewart is a film and culture writer who lives in western Pennsylvania. The views expressed here are solely the author’s own. View more opinion articles on CNN.

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Lately, I’ve been nostalgic for the Quiet Car.

In a world filled with hustle and noise, Amtrak’s dedicated space for non-talkers, readers and introverts was a deeply satisfying breath of fresh air, and I always felt a certain kinship with my fellow quiet-seeking passengers. Almost always, though, there’d be somebody who didn’t get the message, and — despite the signs and the announcements — yammered blithely on their phone while the rest of us exchanged neighborly side-eyes.

Often, I was willing to be the person who sidled over to remind them, as politely as possible, that this was a communal minimal-noise space. After I left New York City, I lived vicariously through like-minded bossy friends (you know who you are, fellow journos) who recounted Quiet Car adventures on social media.

Though fairly low-stakes in the grand scheme of things, the Quiet Car was a valuable metaphor for the way humans can create beauty in community. I find conflict anxiety-inducing, but I was also interested in standing up for our collective rights. And isn’t this how a functioning civilization works? We learn to exist, together, and to be willing to engage in debate about what defines our shared space, about how to respect the rules and how to honor our shared humanity.

And hey, if you’re a loud talker? No worries, the majority of the train is reserved just for you! There’s room for everyone here. Or there used to be.

You wouldn’t find me sticking my neck out on the Quiet Car today. This spring has seen a high-profile spate of deadly violence against citizens who’ve made minor overtures of one sort or another to neighbors or complete strangers. Just this week, a man was taken into custody on charges of fatally shooting five people. The killings allegedly took place after the suspect was asked to stop firing his gun outside near a neighbor’s home to avoid waking a child.

The entirety of our culture now seems increasingly like the Wild West, where the answer to “could you please stop doing that?” or even just “could you help me?” might turn out to be a bullet.

The headlines may make it feel like a sudden phenomenon, but this latest collapse of shared humanity has been happening incrementally over many years, with predictably bloody consequences. And I’m not trying to minimize the body count by invoking the Quiet Car. On the contrary, I think we can use the metrics of how people treat one another in such mundane situations as a bellwether for the state and sanity of the nation.

I’m a longtime student of the school of good manners. (Manners being different from the elitist practice of etiquette, as discussed on a recent episode of the podcast “We Can Do Hard Things.”) In evolutionary biologist Amy Alkon’s book “Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck,” she explains one foundational principle I like a lot.

She says that society “can’t turn back the clock to a world where we all live in a small village and everybody knows everybody and the blacksmith. What we can do is take steps to re-create some of the constraints and benefits of the small groupings we evolved to live in… We could dial back a lot of the ME FIRST!/SCREW YOU! meanness permeating our society if we do just three things: Stand up to the rude. Expose the rude. Treat strangers like neighbors.”

Alkon acknowledges that it’s inherently uncomfortable for most people, but counters that learning to call out rudeness is an exercise in “choosing to live connected instead of alienated. Choosing to be a neighbor instead of a bystander.”

I’d add a corollary to her 2014 writing, which is that calling out rudeness in person is the goal; social-media shaming, while effective, can spiral out of control way more quickly than the shamer intended. And in a moment when the US surgeon general is sounding the alarm about how isolated and disconnected Americans are, thinking about the choices to be connected to each other — or not — take on national significance.

For most of my adult life, I subscribed to this philosophy. I always believed our society, although a complete mess in many ways, was capable of weathering prickly negotiations between people about how we should collectively conduct ourselves.