Stories of insensitivity and cluelessness abound, for all of us, and I could easily fill a book with aggravating examples. People walking slowly down the middle of supermarket aisles with shopping carts, effectively blocking people behind them. A woman in the airport security line, barely conscious of her two small children running around, let alone of the people backing up behind her as she fails to move her container of shoes and bags forward on the table to give us room to unpack behind her, or to move her things after the x-ray to the end of the table so people can grab theirs behind her. People talking on or listening to their phones at full volume on busses, or in libraries, or coffee shops.
Just now, on my flight to Ohio that took off around 6:45 am, the guy with the window seat kept it closed throughout boarding and taxiing (in violation of FAA guidelines, for what it’s worth, but it’s not that that bothered me). Only as we started to generate speed did I finally sigh, smile, and say, “excuse me, but could you open the window? I like to see what’s going on.”
(“What’s going on” is … a pretty poor paraphrasing of what I would have liked to say to him, which was something like, “it’s dark, and I’d like some natural light, and we’re in a beautiful part of the country, with mountains and desert, and why do we have to sit in a cave even now, at take-off, and in any event, couldn’t you at least ask me, the person in the aisle seat, if I share your uncommon (as all the other windows on the plane seem to be open) preference?”).
He looked a little confused, but he turned to the window and opened it … half-way. Which worked for him – he was happy, it turned out, to stare out the window to watch us taxi and take off and circle above the mountains – but because of my distance from the window, the half-closed shade forced me to hunch down or lean as far back as I could to see the mountains. He never even looked at me to notice. Then, after about 5 minutes, still without looking at me, he concluded he had done all he possibly could, closed the shade fully, and turned back to the movie on his laptop.
I wonder, sometimes, whether the level of courtesy and simple awareness of others was higher back in the 50s and 60s – were people trained in it? – or, just like now, did some people have it and some not? And if it was higher … what happened? Was it advertising, marketing, and pop culture, which started suggesting that sacrificing any individual rights or preferences in favor of sensitivity to and concern for the needs of others could only constitute weakness? Is it something else?
I’ve noticed in tennis in recent years that players at the professional level and down through college are actively encouraged to scream and pump their fists at successful points. Long gone are the days of Arthur Ashe and Stefan Edberg. We now prioritize loud demonstration over quiet dignity. Indeed, I can only conclude that professional coaches encourage loud self-expression, perhaps on a two-fold basis: 1) that your primary responsibility is to stay as focused, positive, and energized as possible, and not to worry in the least about how your opponent feels; and 2) indeed, to the extent that your screaming and emoting gets in your opponent’s head, all the better.
This is true in other sports as well, of course. Don Larsen no longer calmly walks off the mound towards the dug-out before being ambushed by Yogi Berra, who jumps on him. Instead, now, we get players falling on the ground in tears or proudly pointing to the skies, or popping their own uniforms, apparently overwhelmed by the moment.
“Me!” we shout to the world. “Look at me!”
No comments:
Post a Comment