I am a avid people watcher. Doesn’t matter if it is at the mall, a ball game, the Vegas Strip, an airport or a cruise ship. While most folks seem to still have some sort of semblance of manners, I have noticed that our society has devolved more and more into the opposite.
I was on my favorite cruise last week (the Alaska Inside Passage). When you are on a ship with 3,500 of your new friends, you notice how people treat others. And let me tell you, it isn’t good. The lack of manners, common decency, helping other and being generally a good person seems to have gone out the window. I am not saying everyone was like that, but it seemed the ones who were like that were the majority.
Seeing people treating cruise employees like crap was disturbing. Seeing passengers treating other passengers like crap was just as disturbing. Very simple things like ‘please’, ‘thank you’, and ‘excuse me’ go a long way when it comes to being polite. Pushing through a group of people to get where you are going without saying anything, slamming a door in an elderly person’s face that is going the same way as you are, digging for gold second knuckle deep in your nose at a formal dinner table, treating an employee like a piece of dirt because of something you did….well, those are just a couple of examples of how people shouldn’t act. But they did.
Is there a solution? I dunno. Maybe take an extra second to be nice to someone and treat them like you would want to be treated. You might be surprised how good it makes you feel. The world has enough self-centered, narcissistic, think they know it all, think they are better than everyone types. Don’t be one of those.
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