At what point does our minds, trick and engrain the belief that one person is more important than any other?
I was in Diablo (Danville area) yesterday morning heading to take my son to sports camp when I came to an intersection. It’s the same intersection I’ve had to turn at for the last week. The car ahead of me stopped, and then went, so logically the car on the other side went. Good- every other car right? The actual act of, you get a turn, and then I get a turn (a learned behavior we hopefully mastered in preschool).
Well this woman in a black Lexus, license plate number- (no just kidding), decided she didn’t want to wait for her turn so she took my turn and ran the stop sign. Then had the BALLS, yes I said, BALLS to give me a dirty look because I started to turn anyway. I gotta tell you, it took every ounce of will power, flower power, or whatever you want to call it, not to flip her- the bird. I wanted to so bad. But I didn’t, I just cursed under my breath and let her go.
I carried on with my routine and smiled as I dropped off my son and got back into my truck to take off back home. I get to the exit of the school and this other woman in a Porsche SUV that cuts me off, (see the trend) when she clearly had the stop sign. At this point, I’m steaming. I started daydreaming of a world where filthy rich bitches that act like they own the world, had to clean the guys bathrooms at the HP Pavilion after an Ozzy Osborne concert. (I didn’t really daydream that. But it would have been nice vengeance.)
The actions of these two people lead me to think about what causes people to believe they have the right to sh*t on common courtesy? Was it their upbringing? Maybe they married into it? Did it creep up on them? Or maybe they were just in a hurry.
I don’t believe we are born entitled. I believe it is a learned behavior. (Follow my thought process, no matter how crazy it might seem.) We turn on the TV, and we are bombarded by a multi-billion dollar industry called Reality TV. The shows are all about pimpin’ cribs, cars, faces or bodies. We see people rippin’ on each other, marrying for money instead of love, and even backstabbing their best friends on national TV. We have become a society that actually relishes in the idea that someone is worse off than us or we become jealous of the wealthy and criticize them for what they have.
Look at Facebook and MySpace, these Social Networking sites have trained us to be the perfect narcissistic society. What other place can you journal about your life and make it available for the whole world to see? And then, to drive the point home, we whole heartedly believe that everyone wants to know what we ate, where we went or how we felt doing it. We can plug our ears with our iPod and listen to all the narcissistic driven songs with sentences starting with me, myself and I. Gone are the days singers would sing songs about falling in love with other people, now they sing about how much we should love them (okay a little generalization here, but you get my point.)
To be fair, this blog is same thing. (Don’t try and defend it) Really, it is. I sit her thinking that you want to hear what I have to say. That somewhere in this heap of a blog, maybe I might say something that will help you in your life. But would you really? Or is it another opportunity for me to hone my self-centered need for you to like me? Maybe if I say something witty, you’ll keep coming back.
I’m no saint, yeah, I said it! I can even go far enough to say I even possess narcissistic tendencies. Maybe narcissism should be a synonym for survival. Hey now, I am ENTITLED to my opinion. Maybe we are evolving to a point where we will be a bunch of little i’s that make up the Wii. (Another pun)
So I leave you with this… If we ever meet up and you feel like I’ve been a total B-I-T-C-H, look me straight in the eyes, raise your fist in the air and flip me the proverbial bird, because I would have deserved it and I really do know how you feel.
Enjoy the link...
Flight of the Conchords, Flippin the Bird
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