Bro, bro, madam, your bag dropped!
Two events that talk about politeness. Now and not so long ago.
CASE ONE
Time passed. The space of that time.
I was still in high school, which speaking from this time perspective is “plus quam perfectum” for today’s high school students.
Well, I’m standing in a department store, the forerunner of today’s supermarkets, and I’m waiting for my company to pass the cash register, to move on, when an old man who was packing his things at the counter drops a stick.
I, in the form of a high school student at the time, reached for the stick and handed it to the older man. Then my school friends also arrived and helped him to pick up the things that were scattered due to the obvious panic that seized him due to the loss of the “balance aid”. At the end of the ballad, that elderly gentleman could not find the right words to thank us for our help and was visibly moved by the fact that a group of boys had helped him.
I’m almost certain that he wouldn’t have been comfortable walking past us if he’d met us on the street before, considering what a group of noisy and ostentatious school guys we were back then.
CASE TWO
Present tense.
I have noticed that it very often happens when driving a car, I stop in front of a pedestrian crossing marked with dotted white strips in order to let a pedestrian pass, and the man on the other side of the “windshield” starts to look suspiciously at who is behind the wheel.
It seems as if he is expecting an acquaintance whom he has a grudge against and who is waiting for him to “get on the line”. Perhaps even more banal than that — it means that the person has made up his mind about something and will recklessly step on the gas the next moment. Often, the last thing a pedestrian expects is that someone will stop to let him cross the pedestrian crossing, as the law requires.
What do these two examples, relatively separated in time and space, say?
It seems that today people are not used to others being accommodating and polite to them.
Maybe we behaved a little more humanely before.
Maybe we could see more often that someone opens the door for someone and lets them pass, or that a younger person gives way to an older person on a tram or bus, or that we let neighbors with their hands full of things get on the elevator first.
And today’s children? I think that in some way they are forced to watch programs of low content value on televisions that have become an integral part of the remote controls of our average family. The lack of choice and the reduction of the “educational” showcase to different variations on the theme of global reality shows with a wide variety of heinous content, news full of morbid content, and evening programs crowded with forensics and murders, will certainly have an impact on how they will treat their peers or elders. About the Internet and the availability of inappropriate content for young people, on another occasion.
I’m not sure that watching and absorbing what’s on the “menu” will give you the basic knowledge of how to treat another person as a valuable human being.
So, isn’t it high time that, instead of big topics, we deal with ourselves a little? Otherwise, there is a great risk that we will have more and more young people of the new generation who will stop noticing the “standing” old woman on the bus as another being, an appearance, while they are reclining and listening to their iPod or some other gadget innovation, in their world under the hood, if it is the old woman was lucky to avoid the backpack, of course.
Thanks for reading!
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