Respect???

You know that you are getting older when you realize that “Respect” has gone out the window. It seems that we are just not teaching it anymore. When I was growing up, you were respectful of your elders such as teachers, other parents and people in authority. Today, I find that there is a lack of it all over. Just the other day, my daughter had to wait over an hour and a half in a doctor’s office for an appointment for the kids. To me, that is a lack of respect for her time. The office staff had to stay there anyway, so why should they care? They act as if it’s no big deal. I know scheduling is difficult, because I did it for over 25 years in a dental office, but to wait that long is disrespectful of the patient’s time.

I have ranted in the past about the disrespect of one’s space. When John and I are in the mall there are people often walking into him while he’s in his motorized wheelchair. It’s incredible how they cannot see him. I want to yell out, hey dope pick your head up!

I feel in today’s world that respect, or lack there of, is not being taught or reinforced at home or in school. John and I will go out either to a restaurant or just to a store and occasionally we will find some kindness such as moving out of his way or an opening a door. Most of the time it is our peers who do so while the younger people just walk ahead, letting the door close on him or cutting him off. Simple things like please and thank you have just gone away. Perhaps that’s more of a northern thing because it seems that as we go south, people remember those words. I have always tried to reinforce the “please and thank you” when the grandchildren are with us. My daughter and her husband have done so as well. Even as much as calling an elder person Miss or Aunt and not by their first name shows respect. My friend’s parents are all gone now. But, I always called them mister or misses. Even as I got older I found that I could not call them by their first names. My kids are the same. Even now that they are grown they can not call my friends by their first names. It is how they were brought up.

My rant about disrespect today is just that, a rant. But when it comes being respectful to others, it shows good training, judgment and character. I find that when there is lack of respect for others, whether it is time, space or just being nice, it shows that they just don’t care and are very selfish. I may be wrong, (at this point John is saying “How did those words taste coming out of your mouth?”). Anyway, you have to learn either in your home or in school about respect for others. As the song says in the play South Pacific, “You have to be taught to love and hate, you have to be carefully taught.”