There's a girl in the passenger seat, arm hanging out of the window at 45 degrees, flicking the ash off a cigarette. She looks at us idly up and down through her copied designer sunglasses. Then she reaches inside and deliberately tosses a large empty soft-drink container on to the road in front of us. It rolls around, spilling ice cubes.

The girl gives us another look. Grins. Stuff you! Who's going to dare remonstrate with her in this age of road rage and common assault? So she gives us the finger. Then the ute blasts off with a shriek of burnt rubber. Welcome to the "stuff you" generation. Where you know you can get away with it. Scene Two: A local liquor store.

There's a kid in front of us, maybe 16 or 17 at most. He's got a carton of beer under one arm and a bottle of rum in the other hand. He slams them down on the counter.

The attendant politely asks for his ID. "Haven't got it with me," he barks.

"Then I'm sorry, I can't serve you," says the attendant.

"Please yourself s---head," says the kid, marching off, leaving the booze on the counter.

"I'm not going to serve him," explains the attendant, "even though he's under age he tries this on at least once a week.

"Makes no difference for him - because his mother comes down later on and buys the alcohol for him."

So stuff you, again. Where's parental discipline or parental example?

You don't have to look hard in Victoria today to realise we are living in a rude, selfish and self-centred society.

The hoons are now running the place, out of parental control and full of booze.

Many of them are well under age.

We were all shocked and appalled at last weekend's crash in which five young men were killed and the driver found to have had a blood alcohol count of 0.91.

There was an empty carton of vodka-mixed drinks in the wreckage.

The next day there were tribute offerings of bourbon cans at the crash site. What does that say?

Two days later we had the drunk and unlicensed teenage girl who slammed a car full of family and friends into a pole in country Victoria. There was a 12-year-old involved in that one.

Followed by the yobbos at Thomastown who rammed a police car parked outside McDonald's.

And the hooligans giving Nazi salutes and firing off flares at the tennis.

Stuff you! Stuff you! Stuff you!

Manners? What are they?

Stuff you! There aren't any, any more.

Because manners are not taught to children. If they were once, they are now ignored or conveniently forgotten.

And so the new "stuff you" generation knows "we can get away with it, any time, anywhere" - because often we don't know any better.

So we can walk down the wrong side of a footpath cannoning into people and swearing if someone gets in our way.

Who's going to pull us up or stop us?

We can use foul language whenever we feel like it. Loudly. Nobody will say "stop it".

Using obscene language was once an offence. Now it is mandatory for print, film and television success.

Swearing is cool. To be copied and used in place of adjectives.

So, stuff you ... we can push ahead through swinging doors and let them flap back into a person's face.

Who cares?

We can push into a queue, elbow someone aside in a supermarket, grab something from someone else in a sale.

Yes, stuff you if we sit in a tram, iPod on, ignoring an older person or a pregnant woman lurching back and forth seeking support. Anybody going to say anything if we sit on the train with our feet on the seat in front?

Who's game enough to tackle us if we then pull out a drink for a swig, chuck the can on the floor or out of the window?

Please? Thank you? Why bother to use either?

They're dead, like obsolete. And they'd take up valuable space in a tweet.

Respect for law and order has gone the way of manners, too.

Law and order itself has become, like, such an old-fashioned thing.

Stuff you!

The weekly toll of vicious unprovoked assaults is testimony enough.

Let alone idle acts of littering, or throwing bottles and cans on nature strips ... or graffiti spraying on any convenient wall.

STUFF you! We can just say it's art and get away with it.

Respect for the police?

What's that?

Who has respect for a uniform any more?

Not the lamebrains at the cricket, or the dimwits doing wheelies through the suburbs, taunting polices, as they give the permanent fingermark with their burnout rubber strips on the bitumen.

Nor the "stuff you" generation who attack paramedics at the scenes of drug and alcohol-fuelled accidents and brawls.

Or the casualties hurling abuse at doctors and nurses trying to patch them up after another weekend of binge drinking.

Respect for the courts? Just watch people leaving the courtrooms and giving the bird to the waiting photographers and TV cameramen after getting yet another community service order or suspended sentence.

So ... does anyone really care any more, or have we all given up?
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If we have, Victoria and Victorians are well and truly ... stuffed.