Sunday afternoon, I headed to the grocery store with a friend so we could get what we each needed for the week. We should have taken what sounded like gunshots (it was balloons being popped) as a sign that maybe it wasn’t the best time to be in the store.

We loaded up the cart, but when we were nearly done, noticed that only a couple of checkout lanes had anyone working them, and were backed up down the aisles, and so was self-checkout. As we neared the self-checkout, a clerk announced that it was cash only. (My friend doesn’t carry cash, and I didn’t have much on me.) Facing the prospect of our frozen items melting long before we got to a register, we put back our groceries and left, while lines of shoppers waited resignedly and mostly politely. Many of them probably didn’t have much of a choice, but we had other options. My friend later went to a different store to pick up a few things, and I went the Instacart route.

It could have ended much differently, especially had those balloons been gunshots and people had reacted to that and the lines in a less-than-civil manner. I was reminded of a story I had read in The Washington Post earlier in the weekend about bad behavior at movie theaters over the past several weekends of “Barbenheimer.”

I haven’t made it out to see “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” yet since I’m not a fan of crowds in the first place, but the stories I’ve heard are enough to make me swear off movie theaters completely (but not live theater around here, especially Argenta Community Theater, as the crowds are usually kind and courteous, even when it’s a sold-out show like “Rent”). Maybe I’ll go when the crowds have died down, or maybe I’ll just wait for them to shop up on streaming platforms.

“‘Barbenheimer’—the twin release of blockbusters ‘Barbie’ and ‘Oppenheimer’—may have broken box office records and brought people out to the theaters in droves,” wrote Sofia Andrade and Janay Kingsberry of The Post, “but it also highlighted a very real problem: Some people seem to have forgotten how to go to the movies, with widespread reports of drunken outbursts, rampant cellphone use and exhibitionism.”

Not that this is a new phenomenon. Last year, Coleman Spilde of The Daily Beast wrote that he walked out of a screening of “TÁR” because, he wrote, “Theater etiquette is in the gutter,” having suffered through people having full-throated conversations, inappropriate laughter and phone use.

Still, that’s nothing compared to what happened at a Denver showing of “Barbie,” according to The Post report. A naked man had to be removed by security, apparently angry and confused that he wasn’t allowed to let it all hang out in a movie theater. (Oh, the stories most police reporters at newspapers could tell about countless people who decided naked … or at least pantless … was the way to carry on everyday business. One of our former police reporters kept getting jealous that the “naked guy does something stupid” stories usually happened when he was off work or when a bureau reporter got to cover them.) Other reports, including some from “Oppenheimer,” included fights, videos and photos being taken with flash, disruptive entries and exits, watching videos on phones during the movie and other bad behavior.

Ann-Marie Alcantara wrote in The Wall Street Journal of how some venues are dealing with the growing rudeness: “Etiquette at public events has become harder to control and manage after the pandemic. At concerts, fans are rowdier than ever, shrieking at artists, blocking people’s views with signs, even throwing items at artists. At Broadway shows, Playbill inserts now remind people to turn off their phones and let the actors do the singing. And now, some movie venues are posting videos to teach people how to behave.”

Have we all just forgotten how to behave in public? Didn’t our mamas teach us better than this? Did some of our mamas just give up?

Roxane Cohen Silver, a professor of psychology at the University of California-Irvine, told The Post in an email, “It is clear that the past three years have been challenging for many people in our country. We have experienced a series of collective traumas, cascading one to the next, which for many has been almost too much to bear. The combination of the pandemic, inflation, mass shootings, climate-related disasters, political polarization and so on, has taxed our capacity to cope.”

Justin Chang, a film critic for the Los Angeles Times and NPR’s “Fresh Air,” told The Post, “I used to be an avid shusher. Now I choose my battles because I don’t want to get stabbed in a movie theater.”

Or shot. It’s not like it would be the first time. (Aurora, Colo.; Corona, Calif.; and Lafayette, La., to name a few.) It’s getting harder and harder to find a place to feel somewhat safe going, between shootings at workplaces, schools, churches, theaters, stores, etc., with all the people who have guns who shouldn’t, and those who open-carry for the purpose of intimidation (you’re intimidating everyone except “the bad guys” and making others feel unsafe because they have no way of knowing if you’re one of “the good guys.”)

“People’s habits were bad before the pandemic. They were bad [during] the pandemic wave, and they’re bad now … It’s always bad, so I do choose to pick my battles now. I just get desensitized to it,” Chang said. “People acting as if a public space is their living room is a problem that affects all of us, not just [in] movie theaters.”

That’s why I don’t go out in public much. Tempers have been at a boiling point for too long, and when some people decide their rights overrule everyone else’s, that’s just a recipe for disaster. We’ve seen the rise in incivility online for years with trolls galore (some of whom apparently do nothing but troll people all day), and in the past decade or so have witnessed too many instances of cruelty and aggressive behavior toward anyone who doesn’t believe as a specific group (usually relatively small but very loud and opinionated) does. Of course that behavior was going to spill over into everyday interactions.

We shouldn’t be at all surprised, but somehow, we seem to be on a regular basis, even when a known con man constantly and publicly proves himself untrustworthy. Maybe we’re just surprised that so many people still haven’t seemed to have caught on yet.

When many of us were kids, we were expected to behave with decorum in public (raising our hands, being polite and considerate of others, etc.), and that carried through to adulthood. We still don’t act a fool at work (unless that’s our actual job), we respect others’ opinions, and we accept that we won’t always get what we want (but will fight for the greater good). I could say that it’s the newer generations that are responsible for the rise in incivility, but that would be wrong. People of all ages have taken part. Some of the rudest people I’ve seen have been my age or older; there will be good and horrible people in each generation (I’m proud that my nephew Dalton and his wife Amanda are two of the really good ones in their generation). How we react to adverse circumstances says a lot about who we really are.

Is this incivility a remnant of the long periods of isolation during the pandemic, and streaming to our computers and TVs becoming the norm? Maybe, but … well, I never decided I must watch a movie naked while streaming. You should thank your lucky stars I haven’t done that in a theater.

The optimist in me isn’t prepared quite yet to throw in the towel, and part of that is because of what I saw Sunday at the store, with people reacting calmly to a frustrating situation. I still have hope that enough of us will remember the Golden Rule and try to live by its principle again.

Unless we like being treated rudely.