Liberty Postings

After several recent observations, my curiosity is growing regarding the following questions:

1. When do you decide the rules don’t apply to you?

2. How do you go through your daily existence showing no consideration for others?

3. Where did your mama go wrong?

I do not understand what makes a person think it is OK to throw a bunch of trash out of his car window.  And, yes, I’m talking to you Toyota driver on Central Pike in Hermitage.  The date was June 29th, the time was approximately 2:30pm, and the objects being disposed included two aluminum cans, an ashtray of cigarette butts, and a paper bag.  The picture is on my phone.

I do not understand why the city of Nashville needed to use 1100 garbage bags to clean up the trash that was left on the ground following the Fourth of July celebration over the weekend.  Hey, this piece of cement looks like a great place to throw my hamburger wrapper and, you know what, I think this spot of grass is a perfect landing ground for the plastic bag that I got when I bought some water earlier today.  Who has that mentality?  Why do you just assume that your trash will be someone else’s mess to clean up, and that’s just fine?

I do not understand why the mom next to me has to carry on a LOUD conversation on her cell phone about her five-year-old’s ballet recital while walking on a treadmill that has a “No Cell Phones” sign hung directly in front of it.  Does the sign say in small print “except for moms who think that their daughter’s fledgling dance career is of urgent importance and takes precedent over consideration for the rest of the members in the gym”?  Maybe I need new contact lenses, because I missed that.

Flashback December 2005:  I do not understand how a group of older teenagers can sprawl out across the seats in a restaurant waiting area while a woman who is eight months’ pregnant (that would be me) and said woman’s grandmother-in-law, who was eighty years old, stand for nearly a half-hour waiting for a table.

I really don’t want this post just to be a rant . . . I honestly want to know how people get to be so self-centered.  How do you develop without a natural instinct to have concern for others, or at least never put that concern above your own desires and comfort?

As I have shared time and again in my writing, I am a big advocate for personal responsibility.  Once you reach adulthood you need to be accountable for the decisions you make and deal with the consequences.  But, where are the consequences?  What is to stop these individuals from continuing in such a self-serving manner?  Maybe such people are just a part of life.  At least I can use them as examples to my children of what NOT to do.

Any thoughts on what makes people act in such a way?  Is this type of behavior getting worse as we increasingly live in an insulated society, with technology allowing us the option of not directly dealing with other people every day?  Or, is this the way some people have always been?