Skip to main content

There Are Good People Out There


     My late mother-in-law used to say, “Nothing surprises me anymore.” Having been exposed to continuous, random, gratuitous acts of violence in the headlines and on television, she, along with most Americans had grown blasé. Insensitivity to violence seems to have permeated society.      
      But lately a new phenomenon has been quietly appearing: the random, gratuitous act of generosity. Let me give you a couple of examples that I am familiar with:
The writer of a letter to the editor of the local newspaper wanted to thank the person ahead of him in the checkout line at a local supermarket. The writer noticed that the leading person was buying a gift card. When the writer went to pay his bill, the cashier handed him the gift card and told him that the preceding customer had asked her to pass it to the next person in line.

The second incident happened to Barbara and me last Saturday at a restaurant where we had gone for breakfast. When we asked for our check, the server told us that our bill had been paid, tip and all, by someone who said they didn’t know us and we didn’t know them. We were free to go.

      To show the prevailing attitude, when I repeated this story to friends, their first question was, “Were you dressed like a homeless person?” Well, I didn’t think so, but I suppose appearance can be relative. It's more likely that most people, including me, have trouble accepting the idea that a stranger would go out of his way to do something generous for another person
      If this insidious practice spreads, who knows what societal upheavals might result?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

There Are Only Seven Jokes - Introduction

      The statement “There are only seven jokes – all the rest are variations,” has been around for a long time, but no one ever seems to know what the original seven are. I think I have found the solution to the mystery.       The answer is to be found in an article published in the New York Times on May 2, 1909. Entitled “New Jokes? There Are No New Jokes, There Is Only One Joke,” it goes on to say that all jokes are a distortion, and lists seven categories of distortion. Supposedly every joke will fit into one of the categories. I believe that repetition changed the seven categories into the seven jokes.       Each of my next seven blogs will be devoted to exploring one of the categories. In addition, I shall attempt to give an example or two of jokes which I think fit the category.       You must realize that this article appeared over one hundred years ago, so most of the jokes appearing therein are so out-of-date that modern readers wouldn’t even understand them. For example,

By Today’s Standards Many of my Teachers Would be in Jail

I started school in a two-room building: grades 1 to 4 in one room; grades 5 to 8 in the other. One teacher in each room taught all four grades. I don’t remember first grade very well – the teacher left at the end of the year. I am pretty sure it was not my fault. Now keep in mind that reading the Bible every morning was the standard for all grades at that time. But my teacher in grades two to four went a little above and beyond the normal practice. As a member of a “plain” sect, she considered it her duty to lead the little heathens to Christianity. She offered a free Bible to all students who managed to memorize 20 verses. I memorized my verses – “Jesus saves” was my favorite because it was the shortest – and got my Bible with my twenty underlined in red. That would be illegal today (not the underlining), and rightly so. Teachers may not teach religion, although contrary to what many folks seem to think, students may bring their Bibles to school, read them, and pray their
The National Anthem I have a somewhat minor pet peeve. I say minor because in the grand scheme of things neither I nor society will do anything substantive about it, so my best bet is probably to suck it up and move on. Perhaps after writing about it I can lay it to rest. It came up recently while I was working out at our Wellness Center. A program on television was playing America The Beautiful , and I remarked to a lady I have known for 40 years that I thought that should be the National Anthem instead of The Star Spangled Banner. She replied, rather huffily, I thought, “Some people think God Bless America should be the national anthem.” At that point I decided, wisely, I think, to back off before an argument sprang up. Now I realize that The Star Spangled Banner is a very nice, patriotic song, but an anthem it is not. According to Wikipedia, “ An anthem is a  musical composition  of celebration, usually used as a symbol for a distinct group, particularly the  nationa