Can't We All Just Get Along?

I don’t claim to be an angel, I’ve done some fairly shitty things in my life, stuff that I’m not proud of but I have noticed recently that there’s been real downshift in peoples attitudes to one another. There’s been a real downswing in the standards of peoples behaviour. It’s been playing on my mind because sometimes I think I’m a misanthrope and sometimes I believe in the general decentness of people.

I try to hold myself to high moral standard. that’s makes me sound bigheaded but the way I see it, if I try to behave well, then perhaps I can lead by example. However I get very upset and angry when others don’t follow that and it can really play on my mind.

I’ll give a couple of examples here.

In Chatham, my hometown, on a Saturday and Sunday we get a few buskers out on the high street. I can take or leave busking but we are lucky enough to have several really good ones and it’s a pleasure to listen to them and can make the day for me. However the flipside of that is that you can find some buskers that ear achingly bad! There is one guy though that stands out. He’s a chap of perhaps Asian or Slavic extraction and he whistles REALLY badly. The man is clearly two stops short of Dagenham (i.e. Barking) and he can come across as properly odd with muttering and gestures, added in to the piquant bouquet of b.o and stale urine. Today I was in town, enjoying a day off and the Whistling Busker was out. People would walk past and give him weird looks and some though would give him abuse and taunt him, bait him much like one would see bears prodded with a stick. The chap in question got really upset with this stormed off shouting gibberish and the maybe half dozen people that had been goading him laughed like this was a happy jape. Thankfully several of them went to walk past me and I got in a good old shoulder barge as they went by. This taps into a deeper affliction in society, one tat allows people to mock the afflicted. I don’t get how people can call themselves civilised and then mock the obviously mentally ill. Look at this video and then you’ll get an idea of what I mean with regard to the Whistling Busker and believe me, the wankers in this video are pretty mild.

Not even 15 minutes later something else happened that absolutely tore at my heart strings. I was outside a supermarket making a call on my phone when a well dressed family of a mum and 3 kids walked past a barber shop. One the small girls, aged around 5 I would guess walked into a street sign outside said haircutting establishment. A group of locals laughed loudly at this, all the while the girl was crying though she was thankfully not hurt. Her elder brother, aged maybe 9, asked his mum “why would they laugh, why don’t they like us?” I have to say, hearing that absolutely tore at me. The people laughing make me ashamed to come from here.

I know that I shouldn’t take it personally, that I shouldn’t allow myself to get upset or dwell on other people being scummy but its been really bugging me since then.

What the hell has society become when people can be so damned causally cruel? Why cant people just at least try to be decent to each other?