By D.R. Monroe
We all know that it’s been tough. There are more Americans on food stamps than ever recorded; Social Security is paying out more benefits than it receives; the salaries of top U.S. CEOs is three hundred times the median income of those who work for them; over sixty percent of us live paycheck to paycheck; the United States has the third worst poverty rate among advanced nations and the U.S. dollar continues to rapidly decline in value (An item that cost $20 in 1970 would cost you $112 today, for instance). These are just a few examples of dozens of embarrassing and, let’s face it, depressing facts that have become our reality. Naturally, one would assume that when times get as difficult as they are now, our universal instinct would be to come together, to help one another, to use our shared dystopic experience as a catalyst for compassion. But by simple observation, my assumptions are making an ass out of me.
In the last year I have witnessed more harshness and indifference than I can recall encountering at any time before and although most of these may be a humorous surveillance to the objective eye, when you think about the antagonist (us) and their victim (us) it’s quite disconcerting. For example, while I was waiting in an infinite parking line in the lot at a Santa Fe Whole Foods (a harsh and disconcerting experience in itself) I watched a middle-aged woman cross (in the cross walk I might add) the pavement and as she did so she dropped her purse, spilling a few but not all of its contents into the street. Not only did more than one fellow Whole Foods shopper walk past the woman without giving her a hand (one actually looked down at her and grinned as she passed), but the person in the front of the parking line proceeded to lay on the horn of their 2010 Range Rover as if the piercing racket would encourage the woman to speed it up.
Now I’m sure we have all witnessed something like this one time or another regardless of crappy economic downturns, “So what?” you may say, and you wouldn’t be out of line. I could inundate you all with further examples of vehicular bullying but the scope of this issue is so much greater. This barrage of boorish behavior seems to be woven into most of our citizens’ everyday attitude and there is one word that truly encompasses what I, and I’d bet (sanguinely), at least some of you are seeing on a weekly basis: Inconsideration. The aire of rudeness and entitlement is astonishing; it’s like an entire population of pigeon-holed Gen X’ers moping and bitching about how their phone’s internet isn’t fast enough and how they should be getting the breaks and not that guy.
There is no great trick or five-step program that I am hocking here – the solution is simple – live by the creed of Road House’s Jack Dalton: Be Nice. Stop cutting in lines at the grocery store and post office. Stop swearing under your breath loud enough for the kid in front of you at Hastings to hear because their mom isn’t moving fast enough. Stop talking so loud on your cell phones in the airport so no one around you can hear themselves think. Stop picking fights with random individuals because you think they looked at you funny in a bar. Just stop it.
I mentioned Santa Fe, the town that I love, but the bad manners are not restricted to the Northern Southwest. Earlier this summer I was in Chicago, a city that I also inhabited at one time, and I was walking down a busy side street in Lincoln Park when I saw a woman getting out of her Rav 4, she stepped awkwardly from her seat and took a digger into the pavement. I was roughly forty yards away and my impulse to run to her aid was relieved by the surety that someone much closer to her would do so. Not only did not one person help this young woman (named Megan as I would learn a few minutes later as I helped her), but two people stepped over her. Now this was not some banged up junkie with a People Who Shop at Walmart wardrobe (not that that should matter), this was a business woman who worked at a bank and was dressed as such. By the time I reached Megan, over a dozen people had passed or stepped over her. She had sprained her ankle so badly that the ER doctor told her she would have been better off breaking it. She was in this much distress and not one person helped. Was this a case of big city mentality or every ass for themselves? Does it matter? And for the record, I am not some dink from Bum Bum Nowheresville and think big city folk have lost their values; I’ve lived in cities with over a million people and in townships of 6,000 – it’s not about the size of the city but the size of our grace.
During the Great Depression, volunteering and the start up of non-profit organizations reached an all time high and set the precedence for decades. Merchants that were fortunate enough to stay open lowered their prices as low as they could while still remaining in business – large profits were overshadowed by helping the fellow man. In 2010 the only market that dropped its pricing as a whole was the fast food industry, an industry already known for being cheap and offering low quality ingredient meals, in some cases bordering on malnutrition (not to say their price reduction isn’t helping people curb their hunger, I’m just saying). Economists on both spectrums make their points that lowering prices during a recession does not help to stimulate it and vice versa. I’m not an economist, but my point is that it would appear that the merchants in the late 20’s and 30’s made things more affordable out of an innate reaction to their communities’ suffering. Regardless of gaining or losing money, it would appear those seventy years ago, American citizens, as a whole, seemed to care more for the well being of their counterparts where I argue that today it’s much more every man for himself.
We all know it’s been tough. Instead of doing what we’re doing; exercising our rights to be self-centered and intolerant of our natural imperfections, let’s recognize this collective consciousness as an opportunity not to clam up and ration our compassion in immeasurable dosages, but rather band together and extend our hands to one another. Holding out for only ourselves will not help us get through these incredibly hard times, holding out for only ourselves will simply harden our souls and couch us in a different kind of recession, one that will not tighten our wallets but calcify our hearts. We should be getting out of our cars, kneeling down instead of stepping over, and extending our hands instead of shoving them in our pockets. Plato once said, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” And right now, we’re all fighting a hard battle.
