With every passing day I am forced to evaluate myself and the way I look at things. Let me back up, over the past year maybe longer I have become increasingly more cynical and have lost faith in people. NOT one person or a group of people, but all people, every breathing member of society or at least what is left of it.
Everyday there is a chance for another person to do something nice or say something polite to another person, a stranger even, and that chance goes right down the drain. Is it so hard for us to be polite to each other? This is something that vexes me very much on a daily basis. I hold a door, no response, push the elevator button for someone, no response, move out of the way of someone in a hurry, no response.
It seems the only response I get is when I decide to let said person know that I did hold that door open "your welcome!" or pushed that button "hey, I got that for you don't hurt yourself!" and my most recent "really, is it that hard to say thank you douchebag!" Recently I have been getting more and more angry by the day. Then a couple of weeks ago it really started to kick into gear; after all the doors not held open and all of the ignoring as if I am the doorman, or a simple good morning I started to notice more bitterness and just a simple disregard for other people by 95% of the people that I come across.
2 weeks ago I am on my normal 7:02am train into NYC (God i hate the LIRR, but that's a different blog for a different day) and the person next to me, we will call him Richard or Dick for short, receives a phone call, okay I think to myself "lets not freak out, I am sure this phone call wont last long." Fast forward 10 minutes and Dick doesn't speak English, which I know because he is still on the phone and speaking at loud volumes so now I am fully awake and pissed. "Shh!" "You can't be serious, this is a joke!" are all phrases shooting out of my mouth at loud volumes to this person that is sitting less than six inches away from me, but somehow ignoring me UNTIL I look directly at him and say "Are you f'n serious dude its 7am hang up the f'n phone and have some respect for the people around you!" This statement finally gets his attention and he stops speaking in foreign tongues for 5 seconds and looks directly at me, staring blankly with this look of confusion and goes back to his conversation. So now this is it, I am going to jail! I will take his cell phone smash it in 200 pieces and feed it to him. Well I didn't feed it to him, I figured any jack ass that gives me that look of pure confusion doesn't have a clue and I am sure one day something bad will happen to him anyway and I am okay with that.
Example #2: Again on the train (starting to see a pattern here, no wait it happens everywhere) a giant sneeze sneaks up on me, not the mousy kind, the loud, I hope this isn't messy type. So I let loose this huge, non messy, but super loud uber sneeze and what do I hear next? Crickets, f'n crickets. Now this was a 5:40pm train that has not left the station left, its full, but quiet and not one person even whispered a God Bless You or gazoontite , nothing. So of course me being the ever friendly non sarcastic lovable person follow up the crickets with "Really, nothing, thanks everyone."
A couple of weeks ago a plane went into the Hudson and people were falling all over each other to help out it is an amazing thing to witness, but why do we have to wait for the most extreme cases of tragedy and heroism to be people, I mean real people.
I was venting about my morning yesterday to someone who knows me very well, probably too well and finally she said to me "you cannot let this stuff get to you and ruin your day, if you keep doing this you will be a miserable person!" After hearing this my mind starts cranking, is she right? Am I, are we all destined to just give up and not be nice to others, has being polite gone the way of VCR's, Home Phones, Family Vacations, good music and Cd's? Is it inevitable that we are all going to end up bitter strangers who only help others when its beneficial to us? Has opening a door for a women or giving up your seat to a pregnant woman just simply vanished? If so how do we get it back?
Truthfully and shockingly I have no idea what the next step is. Please add comments, maybe someone reading this has and idea or suggestion?
How Things Work
8 years ago
