by Jean-Michel Desmeules

Created on: April 20, 2009

We are in a low point in our history when a 28 years old boy talks about the lack of respect and civility there is in our society. People my age and younger are usually the ones who have a certain lack of respect, but even we are finding that we need to have more civility and respect! Unfortunately, at the present time it seems like every time you go out there is going to be someone that will act disrespectfully towards you. Sad but true, and people do it with total disregard for the true potential of their actions. When you think of the average person you don't think of a killer, yet an increasing amount of average normal folks today are responsible for serious incidents, leading sometimes to death. Little acts are also performed often, like spitting on someone, flipping them off, keying their car, badmouthing them at the office and inventing bad stories about them, not letting someone walking across the street when we're comfortably sitting in our car, case and point: added "ingredients" in a meal that was sent back in the kitchen of a restaurant! Need I say more?!

Personally, I feal the cause for this is a general reduction of people's fears. I think that in the days of old, your lack of respect or incivility would get consequences and bad ones! Or you feared god/s and that led you to act in an appropriate way. But in our era where people don't fear reprisals, religion or what other people around them will say: they now feel free to express their disrespect and lack of manners towards any and all. The fact that fear has kept people respectful is sad, but it does seem like it's been the case. This is not to say that fear was ok, what I mean to express is that people now have to make the choice to be respectful, whereas before they seldom had to make that choice for themselves.

If it's a choice you want to make, remember that there are no prayers to say, no weird rituals or any temple to attend. You just have to act respectful and civilized as much as possible, each day getting better at it. Others around you will start cooperating more and more with you and your days will get easier. The entire world could unite and cooperate this way and think of all the advancements in all fields, not least of them medicine, to gain from that and it is within our grasp just by acting civilized and respectful towards each other. You don't even have to change your habits, you can do the same things you do in your normal day and there's nothing to read.

To me it's almost as if humanity is a growing adolescent trying to become an adult, but there are little bumps left on the roadWe have come a long way since the Stone Age though, but I think that the "times of choices" we are in today will be defined by the choices we do actually decide to make. The problems of our society will not vanish just because we're acting ok towards each other, of course not, but working together gets the problems taken care of faster and easier. And who knows maybe one day our race and planet may be on the threshold and solving our problems fast and easy might be better than a "one in a billion" chance to survive simply because we're fighting eachtother all the way.

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