I can't help myself. It's just my nature. But every time our country faces a major, all-encompassing, turn-everything-upside-down, everyone-is-affected-in-some-way disaster, I keep hoping that at least we will learn from it and be better for it in the long run.

And so I sit here, like so many business owners and investors, and mentally survey the economic landscape post bailout and wonder: Have we learned anything … anything at all?

Maybe it's too much to hope for that-as we agonize over our balance sheets, nervously watch the stock market each day, and cringe when our 401k reports come in the mail-we collectively ponder our business behavior of just a few months ago and consider how that behavior might change for the better when the times inevitably do the same.

From my vantage point, I'm hoping that if this nightmare rollercoaster ride has any long lasting affect, it will be to humble us. I have seen over the years, aided and abetted by technology, a steady decline in basic courtesy and a quantum leap in arrogance on the part of many business people. We discourage human contact through caller ID and voice mail, while excusing rudeness as a necessary byproduct of email. We excuse this by insisting we are just too busy to waste time on another human being. After all, time is money, profit is king, and we're all slammed with work.

I already know the counterpoint to what I just said. If business people don't stay focused, the competition will steam roll them. But where is it written that employing basic common decency to your daily work practices must be counter productive to achieving success?

Allow me to share a real example. A necessary part of publishing a newspaper, even one generally well received like Hospital News, is the need to sell advertising. Even though advertising is a proven way to help generate awareness and business, for some reason most organizations treat ad sales people like long lost, ne'er do well relatives looking for a hand out.

Recently, I left a message with a healthcare organization to gauge its interest in buying an ad. Getting no response, the next day I called again. And the next day. And the next. Okay, maybe I should have taken the hint, but I began seething that I wasn't even worthy of an obligatory blow-off call back. Even if they left the "get lost" response after hours on my answering machine, at least they would have acknowledged my existence. So I continued my one-sided game of "you're it" for ten straight days before giving up.

Could it be that everyone at this healthcare institution is so busy that nobody can return a phone call? Not likely, since someone there found time to respond to our random survey and when asked what he or she didn't like about Hospital News, he or she responded, "Aggressive salespeople."

It reminded me of Butch Cassidy saying to the Sundance Kid as E.H. Harriman's posse of high-paid lawmen continued to pursue them, "That's bad business. How long do you think I would be in operation if every time I pulled a job, it cost me money? Just pay me what he's spending to make me stop robbin' him, I'd stop robbin' him." Or in my case, if you just return my call within a decent amount of time, even if you're turning me down, we'll save time and probably think a lot better of each other.

My sense is that, for the moment as the wheels of commerce have slowed to a crawl, we all have more time, time we can use to return those calls, write thank you notes, or even make personal visits to potentially new as well as loyal customers. Our self-importance has been dissipated by economic turmoil. Perhaps our basic human decency will stage a re-emergence.

I can hope, but I don't really expect much. Seven years ago, our country was unexpectedly and viciously attacked and the short term impact was to unite us in ways few of our generation have ever seen. But the American flags that seemed to fly everywhere have for the most part been taken down, we've for the most part stopped reaching out to our neighbors, and we are allowing another election cycle to carve deep, intractable divisions between us.

Today, we are experiencing yet another expensive lesson on how to be human-made even more expensive by the fact that, when the economy heads towards its inevitable upturn, so few of us will really have learned anything.

Harvey Kart