This afternoon my family and I arrived home from a week long journey of visiting family and friends starting in New York, making our way to Pennsylvania and our last visit placed us in Alexandria, VA. While the focus of this trip was family, I could not help but notice the people around me as they unknowingly displayed obnoxious after self absorbed displays of complete entitlement. None of this was more self evident than when these fine specimens of humanity attempted to drive.
The levels of ignorance and stupidity seem to increase when hitting the highway.The amazing part of driving over two thousand miles in a trip is watching traffic come to a grinding halt for absolutely no reason. There was no accident or construction for us. However at every exit, merging traffic or not, traffic came to a standstill. Then there were the left lane bandits and everyone has encountered them. These are the idiots whom, for whatever reason, ride the left lane going extremely slow and completely oblivious to the 20 cars attempting to pass them and shooting glaring looks as they do. Worse even is when they create a roadblock by riding side by side with a car or truck in the right lane going extremely slow and again, either don't care or ignore the ever growing number of cars that are slowly piling up behind them. When my blood began to boil, however was when passing said lane Nazi and shooting them your dirtiest look, they don't even see it. Why? Because they are texting on their phone of course as they do 60 in a 70 and traffic flow is averaging 78.
My other encounter happened at the grocery store with my one item standing at the checkout in front of a rather large woman also holding one item, a cake. Thinking this would be a quick trip, my friend and I waited patiently behind her. As soon as it became her turn, another woman followed by about 5 or 6 kids, pushes past us exclaiming "I'm wit her!!" Her cart is filled with a variety of junk food and several half eaten cookies as she takes her self presumed place in front of the cashier. Meanwhile, the kids are running amuck as she obliviously loads her goods on the counter. packs of gum are being thrown, opened and the front of the store is filled with yells and shouts from these imps. When one of the women seem to finally take notice of the children, they do nothing to stop the madness but instead have one of the older girls scream in the face of the line jumper "I WANT SOME GUM NOW!!". This loud, insolent demand was met with her requested reward for such blatently rude behavior. When they finally did leave, the once tidy area was in disaray and not one person said a word, simply exchanged looks of disapproval.
Has society always been this self serving and entitled and I was not aware of it or is it indeed getting progressively worse? This problem infiltrates every aspect of our lives from politics to grocery trips. People need to stop being so self absorbed and start becoming more self aware as well as paying attention to their surroundings and start holding themselves accountable for their choices and actions. Sounds easy but the majority of the population has yet to do it. I wholeheartedly believe that this simple shift as a personal goal for everyone could make a huge difference towards making this world a better place. Most of us already know how, it is simply a matter of acting on it and becoming more aware of your choices, actions and others.
