It’s a Mean Old World

The first time I heard that was from an unlikely source. Decades ago I had a client who was an elderly Jewish widow. She had all kinds of money, owned a condominium in the same building as Elton John in Buckhead, Atlanta. She and her husband had worked hard and been successful so I couldn’t understand why she had that outlook on life. Then one day I was at her home and her son stopped by. He was in his fifties I would guess and was permanently crippled from polio, which he had contracted as a child. I began to see how she might think the world was mean if she had seen him suffer, both physically, and in other ways from going through life with a disability. He, like my parents, was born before the polio vaccine was invented. None of my immediate relatives ever contracted it, but neither my mom nor my dad ever learned to swim because of the danger when they were growing up. I never found out any more about my client’s son’s story. All the money in the world could not cure what polio had done to him during childhood.

A lot of years have passed since I heard my elderly friend make that comment and for the most part I had forgotten it, being an optimist I guess because so many kind things have happened to me I tend to take the good in people for granted. But here lately it does seem like the world has gotten meaner. We’re all shouting at each other, cursing and threatening to kill each other over the slightest thing. I know social media has caused most of it, the more we give into our emotions online, the better our chances of going viral, which seems to be everyone’s goal these days. We can now vent our frustrations to the world. As I recall, pre-internet that was something I would only do with my closest friends and family and in private. Now it’s become the norm to show our worst selves to the world at large. And where a friend or family member would listen and try to calm our negative emotions, now once it goes viral there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it. The media companies themselves, but we all know that isn’t going to happen, not in a million years.

So there we are. Yes, there’s lots of good things going on but what gets the most attention in all of our media is the ugly, the frightening, the worst. Maybe that little old lady was right, it is a mean old world after all. Too bad because most people are really basically good. I still believe that, in spite of how it looks online.

Good Citizens

I notice frequently while driving that a majority, or close to a majority of people do not bother to use turn signals. I almost always use mine, unless there’s no one else on the road. Sometimes if I’m in a turn-only lane I will forego the blinker but most of the time I turn them on about fifty feet before turning. I am especially careful to do this when on the Interstate. That way if I don’t happen to see a car in the next lane, at least they can see that I intend to move over and hopefully avoid any accidents.

Sometimes I think other’s failure to use the turn signal is due to them being on the phone and not having a free hand at the time. But today I saw a couple of instances where they just didn’t bother. They saw me signalling and just turned in front of me without any indication that they were going to do so. Just another indicator of how we have come to treat each other, in many cases, our neighbors, in this society, formerly known as the greatest democracy in the world. A growing lack of respect for each other cannot in the end be a good thing. When we show disregard for others who are in our near proximity, what does that say about our society? Are we really so busy that we cannot extend common courtesy to those who are around us? Busy doing what? It saddens me to observe what we are turning into sometimes. I worries me to think that we are short selling the things that make for a great society: consideration, kindness, justice. I wonder too about the implications of our disregard for each other in these small matters, if it indicates the same feeling in matters of more importance. My hope is that before we get too far gone in this we will stop to consider where all of this is leading. Is this going to be the land of the selfish and the home of the greedy?