AFRIEND told me the other week about how he was involved in a road rage incident.

Pretty good going for a nondriver, I remarked at the time.

It had been the middle of the day, a usually quiet suburban street, two young men in the middle of the road going hammer-andtongs over some infringement of road etiquette, and him in the middle keeping them at arms length as the threats, provocation and foul language ebbed and flowed.

The first thing that struck him – and I imagine other people have had the same experience – was that the angry pair were totally oblivious to the spectacle they were making of themselves.

Self-respect had long departed The second was that quite a lot of people passed by without giving the commotion a second glance.

It’s sad but we have become a “heads-down, keep moving” kind of society, that has come to tolerate the kind of behaviour in public places that would not have been acceptable 50 or maybe even 20 years ago.

I have said this before, but it is a simple fact that when we leave our homes on a morning, we generally don’t expect to be mugged or return to find our house burgled.

But I suspect quite a few of us anticipate that whether we go by foot, bus or car, we will experience aggressive, inconsiderate or unpleasant behaviour before we reach our journey’s end.

It might be someone mouthing obscenities into their mobile phone on the bus, a driver who has forgotten the meaning of the word patience, a speeding motorist who can’t wait to get past or the pavements strewn with the bottles and half-eaten takeaways that constitute the remains of somebody’s good night out. In the greater scheme of things these may all be inor irritants but they are more than enough to put a damper on someone’s day.

Sadly, we’ve come to accept them as part and parcel of urban living.

And, of course, on anti-social media websites it seems that you can be as rude – and anonymous–- as you like with very few changes of a comeback.

I don’t buy into the myth of a perfect past.

A few weeks ago, I described the treatment meted out to gay people in the 1950s as barbaric.

We weren’t much better when it came to black people, disabled people and women either.

Nor do I accept that other myth that it is all the fault of young people.

Some of the worst pieces of aggressive driving and plain rudeness I’ve experienced have come from people certainly old enough to know better.

We’ve never really bottomed the problem of low-level, pervasive anti-social behaviour.

It’s like those jobs around the house you always put off until another day.

The job will be harder in the long run, but maybe it’s time to tell ourselves, and the nuisance- makers, that it’s time to stop. To put an end to the vandals and wreckers.

It won’t be easy as it means individually and collectively moving out of a comfort zone, challenging unpleasant attitudes and unpleasant people, But there is support and there will be rewards.

We shouldn’t walk on and we shouldn’t leave it to someone else. I believe that we have a civic duty to get involved.

These are our streets and our communities and we need to tell the wreckers – quietly but very firmly – that we mean to reclaim ownership of them.