Seattle is giving up on the automated public toilet, with city officials saying they've become too filthy, crime-ridden and vandal-prone to work. You might say that's not the most critical policy issue out there, but this story speaks to a real public concern.

"Other cities around the world seem to be able to handle toilets civilly," one city councilman said, and "civilly" may be the key word here. One of the consistent themes we've run into in our opinion research is that people think their fellow Americans are increasingly rude, disrespectful and inconsiderate, and it bothers them. A lot. In our Aggravating Circumstances survey, one of the first to focus on this problem, we found eight in 10 called "a lack of respect and courtesy" a serious problem in society. More than half (52 percent) said bad incidents are difficult to shrug off and tend to stay with them for some time.

What's also striking is that the issue of civility also crops up when we're examining other issues as well. We find it's a strong theme in education, for example – a stronger theme than many educators seem to want to deal with. Even students complain about profanity and rudeness in their high schools. And it's a powerful theme in people's attitudes about parenting, where parents tell us they're always playing defense against the crude influences of pop culture.

It isn't that people are looking for the government to solve this. In focus groups, we usually run into one or two people who want media censorship or some kind of Singapore-style legally imposed courtesy, but far more see this as their own battle. Four in 10 admit they've behaved badly themselves. And they largely see protecting their kids as their job (and they expect other parents to do this as well). When a major city can't sustain a minor public convenience, it just provides the public with more evidence that they can't quite trust their fellow citizens to behave.