The Logical Extension of Entitlement

I nearly got creamed coming out of my driveway this morning. I stopped at the sidewalk and looked both directions, very carefully. By turning my whole upper body. There were no approaching vehicles in view.

I lifted my foot off the brake pedal, allowing my car to roll gently back into the street.

A flash of black-and-chrome, my rear view mirror is filled with pickup truck.

My reflexes are pretty good, and I stomp on the brake pedal again, as he swerves around my rear end, doing perhaps twenty-five miles per hour. We do not collide.

I live on a residential street which runs parallel to an arterial four-lane road, and people often disregard speed limits, in spite of the city's deliberate neglect of the pavement. The street has dips at most intersections that will bottom out almost any car exceeding twenty-five, and evenings at my house are generally punctuated with periodic BANGs as people discover the dip at my corner. (Suspension and chassis parts are a not-too-uncommon sight on the street and sidewalk.)

So, I am accustomed to speedy travellers. This is why I look carefully before backing out of my driveway.

This guy, however, was part of a relatively new phenomenon. He was speeding (you KNOW he hit his brakes as he maneuvered to avoid me)...and he had run the stop sign at the corner of the street he turned off of. Had to. If he'd come from anywhere else, I would have seen him before he filled my rear view.

I'm noticing now (because I can watch that stop sign from my window as I type this) that a lot of people ignore that stop sign. Most who do render honors to the stop sign do so in a passing manner; tap the brakes and damn-the-torpedoes-Gridley-it's-full-speed-ahead.

Then there is the kid with the motorized scooter. No, I am not talking about a motor-scooter with a seat, I am talking about the kind of scooter that was popular a few years ago (Razors? Remember them?) but with an unmuffled two-stroke gasoline engine on it. It is ridden standing up, and I swear, the thing will exceed twenty-five. (I doubt that he will exceed twenty-five, if he keeps riding the thing on the street. Or on week nights after 11 pm.) I mention this kid because that stop sign apparently doesn't apply to him, either.

People seem less concerned about being annoyingly noisy these days. Motorcyclists come to mind, but also pretty much anyone who goes to the movies these days. Is the conversation during the movie really necessary? I can forgive the odd comment to one's neighbor, but a conversation on one's cellular phone is beyond rude, especially after the snazzy polite-but-feebly-humorous public service announcement theaters play to remind you to turn off your cell phone. The message from these people seems to be, "Fuck you, what I want is more important than what you want."

Malls and airports seem to attract people with no sense of how to get along in crowded society. Yesterday, while hurrying to meet RadiantSmile's plane, I encountered a smallish cluster of people that were all but blocking a narrow spot on the main walkway through the terminal. One was a woman with a canine-companion-in-training, talking with another woman who was fawning over the puppy in spite of the message on its yellow sweater which read, "Leave me alone. I'm in training, so please don't slobber all over me because I'm cute," or words to that effect. Lastly, there was a couple with a five-foot-long tandem stroller parked crosswise to the traffic lane. As I approached at the quick-step, the father of the two toddlers steps into my path. I said, "Oop!" and managed to stop without running into him, but by a scant couple of inches. Now, I know that a man my size can be unintentionally imposing, so rather than meet his gaze, I looked down at the floor...no need to appear threatening, after all...but backing up was out of the question. First of all, it was crowded, and I probably would have backed into someone behind me, and second, I was fighting inertia, which still wanted to carry me forward through the gap in humanity that now no longer existed. Dad simply stands there and glares at me. Clearly, he would rather I stepped on the puppy than ask him not to block the terminal thoroughfare. And it's also apparent that he and his wife felt entitled to do their baby maintenance right there regardless of how they affected those around them.

Several years ago...about a month after 9/11, in fact...while standing in a two-hour long security line, the woman in front of me turned and asked, "My flight's in twenty minutes. Do you think I'll make it?" When I suggested that she talk to a ticket agent, she asked if I would watch her bags. Without waiting for an answer, she started to walk away. The second time I said no, I made sure she heard me, and to the amusement of the other passengers in line, she called me an asshole. The airline responded to her obtuseness (and obtuse she was, since one would have had to go to incredible lengths to deliberately avoid any knowledge of the speed bumps involved in air travel so soon after Al Qaeda had its messy way with us) by giving her a personal escort to the head of the security line. Worse, all of the airlines then began to patrol the security lines for passengers short on time...escorting each of them to the head of the line to be whisked through to catch their flights, while those of us who didn't ignore the plentiful warnings about long security lines had to stand and watch. In retrospect, I should have left her bags where they were and pointed them and her out to the nearest security agent...just like the announcement says.

One of the things I find enormously frustrating these days is the tendency to ignore the recommendations of people who know what they're talking about, in favor of continuing a debate about how to solve a particular problem. This happens often in my professional community. Now, I'm the first to admit that I'm not ever the smartest guy in the room, but I am often the most experienced. If you come to me with a problem and I offer you a solution, please do me the courtesy of at least trying my solution before coming back to me with the same problem and asking my advice again. Last year, a colleague asked me for my input on the sixth draft of the same document I'd seen five times before. I have the utmost respect for him...he's smart, experienced and thoughtful...but he was over a year late in finishing that project, and it needed to get unstuck, so I flatly refused to look at the thing until after it was published. He's moved on to another position, but his successor is doing the same thing...and it's bogging the whole community down.

What all of these people have in common is the misperception that their own thoughts, feelings and desires are automatically given the same consideration as those of the people around them. News flash: they're not.

I've started to think of this philosophy as Neo-egalitarianism: the belief that, in a society of equals, an individual has a right to assert his or her thoughts and desires with the expectation of acceptance, and can act with the certainty that acceptance is a foregone conclusion.

It's that last part that gives people the sense that they have a right to be pissed off when things don't go their way. Watch people closely, and you'll see what I mean.

The worst part of it all is that we reward people for behaving this way. Late for your flight because you ignored dozens of warnings about increased airport security? Go to the head of the line!

The military has an interesting word for the process of resolving clashes: deconfliction. Ideally, deconfliction measures anticipate problem areas and provide a means of avoiding them. A stop sign is a good example of a deconfliction measure. So is a warning about heightened security, or a lame pseudo-trailer featuring Indians and a herd of buffalo scared off by a cell phone.

As much as we'd like to think that Equality is possible, it really isn't. There will always be differences in the way people think or act; differences in personality, talent and experience mean that the best we can hope for is parity.

Based on my experiences lately, I'd say there's not much hope of that, either. Not as long as most of us put ourselves above the people around us.