RESPECT… Admittedly, I have not always done “good” things in my life. However, I consider myself to be a good person. There are so many persons out there in this world who believe that it is their place to pass judgment on those who do not meet up with their expectations of what and how they think another person should feel about them. I am as guilty as the next person who passes judgment on another, because it is human nature to place expectations on another while not taking a good look at what it is that you should be expecting of yourself and not of others. I know that I will continue to make bad choices and good choices for the remainder of my life and I will not apologize for that because I am a person, a human being and I reiterate, this is human nature. What I cannot grasp is the expectation that RESPECT is something entitled to anyone. There are some things I have been taught by many people (laypeople, friends, family, self-proclaimed scholars and even the observations of the actions of people I don’t know), whether through experience or just conversation, these bits of knowledge have stuck with me through the years. One of these things is the RESPECT should not be expected by anyone just because of their accomplishment(s), be they small or large. RESPECT is earned. The only thing that people DESERVE is common courtesy. YOU EARN RESPECT….not by verbally or orally beating another person down and making them feel less than, and demanding respect because of a hierarchy within your profession, or by the monetary wealth you have, but by being as close to a good person as possible, and yet there is still no guarantee that RESPECT will be given, but there is always the hope that it may be. I am not as learned as most; I don’t claim to be a scholar in anything or a specialist in anything other than my own life. A piece of paper in a frame with some institution of higher education that hangs on office wall, the number of books that have been published with your name on it or the number of books you have read, a person’s yearly salary, the pseudo-power that is held over others does not entitle anyone to respect, it entitles them to COMMON COURTESY. In my opinion the sure fire way of losing the respect of colleagues and peers and those that you consider beneath you is to demand something that you have not earned, or even worse yet shown, a modicum of common courtesy. I do my best not to demand RESPECT because of who or what I am or the pseudo-power that I may hold over anyone. I request common courtesy because that is what I have been taught and I respect that teaching. In this life, and it is the only one you are given at this time, you get what you give. So if you want RESPECT earn it. I am just saying, I guess, that if you want respect, treat people the way you would want to be treated if you were placed in their shoes. If you treat the people that assist you or the people that love you with less than common courtesy, the respect you are looking for will never come. It will be replaced by “fear” and fear is not RESPECT, it is degrading to the person that fears you and that degradation does not flourish into respect, it only breeds contempt for the person demanding that you respect them, and it flourishes into a form of hatred and distrust. In summary, some of the people that I HAD respect for, I now fear and it has begun to flourish into a form of hatred. I would love to go through a day where I don’t feel resentful of the way that I HAVE ALLOWED people to treat me. All people deserve common courtesy, not all deserve respect, especially when others demand it. Sometimes you don’t learn from your life’s lessons, other times you do. I believe that I have learned something, if only by observation. Expect common courtesy (it will not always be given, but expect it) and know that you need to earn the respect of others, and the way to do that is to treat them and speak to them as you would like to be treated and spoken to. I am discouraged at some of the things that I have witnessed and heard lately, but I will still stand by my opinion that I am a generally good person and I do try to give my all in everything that I do and to know that at least two people, that I did have respect for think of me as the junk that gets scraped off of the bottom of their shoe, has shaken me to my core and hurt me a great deal. However, this feeling will pass and someday, with any luck, the people who make demands will learn that to ask for respect and not demand it will get further with all the people they come into contact with in this life. Take from this post what you will, however the bottom line is that it does not matter what you do for a living, what level of education you have, the type of car you drive or how well read you are, you EARN RESPECT, it will not be given freely because you THINK it is deserved. Always remember that the ladder wrung that you step on and break today, you may need tomorrow.
Posted on: Sat, 29 Mar 2014 17:16:43 +0000
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