"fear" v. "common sense"

There's one story I forgot to tell about Lucha Libre night.
It seemed at one point that the guy selling Luchador masks had quit going around and selling them. I asked one of the guards/ushers at the door about where the man who sold them was, and he pointed me to portly mustached man wearing a Spider-Man T-shirt. The Spider-dude said that I needed to follow him outside where all the masks are.
Then Vinnie (a native of New York and current roommate) caught me and told me that I should ignore the offer or else ask Spider-dude to bring them back inside.
"But isn't that rude?" I asked.
Eventually I pretended to agree with Vinnie. As it turned out a different man (not Spider-dude) came back with masks during another break. Vinnie was probably right.
"Being rude" is what gets people into trouble in Tennessee (the steriotypical image of the guy with a shotgun saying "get off my property!" comes to mind, even though that's never happened to me). Politeness is valued here too, perhaps more-so at times. But there's also a whole set of assumptions that, being from a small town, I never really learned, about cities.
For me, suspecting the worst of other people is something I got over. In middle school I was nervous the swimming pool for fear someone might laugh at me, especially when I was with my parents. Learning that people aren't going to laugh at or humiliate you usually (which as a child I assumed was the worst that could happen) was a part of growing up. From there on, I made the logical jump that people are good until proven otherwise, and that planning for the worst was doublethink.
On one car ride to a club (can't remember which) I had a talk with some girls from Minneapolis who told me that it's not fear, it's Common Sense.
Well This is what was Common Sense:

• Wear a seatbelt (Seatbelts are often sunken into seats in Mexico possibly from disuse?)
• Motorcycle helmets (I actually rode a motorcycle with Raul in Ixlilco, with no helmet).
• Wash your hands before eating ... (And look like a paranoid Gringo Idioto!)
• Tall walls with broken glass = just creepy (they're the trend on this street)

A Note on that last one: I've come to appreciate them as an excellent sustainable re-using of glass. Same goes for making cattle fences out of matress springs, which I saw in Ixlilco. Maybe instead of all these key cards at Warren Wilson College, we should invest in some tall walls with sustainable broken glass...