I Hate Indecent People

There is one category of people that I cannot stand, and those are people who are indecent human beings.

I’ve had the misfortune of getting to know far too many more of these people than I care to recall.

I once participated in a group lunch at a restaurant in which our server, a young kid who was making an honest living by working as a waiter, told us he attended a local college where he played football.  Upon learning this, the gang leader of the lunch, to the embarrassment of apparently only me, proceeded to mock the server for receiving perhaps too many excessive blows to the head.

There was also a time that I was associated with an individual who, upon scratching another person’s car in a parking lot, proceeded to drive away from the scene without leaving a note, over the objections raised by other passengers in the vehicle.

These are appalling, atrocious, deplorable, despicable, disgraceful, disgusting, egregious, embarrassing, horrid, offensive, obscene, outrageous, reprehensible, repugnant, repulsive, unconscionable and vile human beings.

I despise them.  I loathe them.  I feel unclean simply being around them, much less associating myself with them.

These people, and others like them, infest this world, from the academia and business to politics and law, and higher their IQ and more elitist their education, the more unbearable they become.  They think and act as if their intelligence and their ivy-league education somehow entitles them to treat others, and society in general, with disrespect.

They do not.

Their unjustifiable behaviour only highlights how smarts and stature are worthless without the most basic human decency to accompany it.  Whatever ideas, thoughts and opinions these people may have, however intellectually-sound, interesting or thought-provoking they may be, I am not the least bit interested in listening, considering or giving the slightest attention.  To do so would be a tremendous waste of my time.  By failing to have that most fundamental of things called common courtesy and human decency, none of what they do or say can lead to any valuable contribution to society.

It is in the small things, like in the treatment of the servers at restaurants and the conduct when no one is watching, and not the big things, like what the person’s political ideology is, that defines a person and determines whether that person is worthy of the life that he has been blessed to be given.  If you wonder why places like Enron fell into a state of depravity, it’s because there are people who don’t give a crap about showing the basic respect to others that they themselves think they’re somehow entitled to.

These people are unsalvageable.  Pointing out their disgusting nature to their face is a pointless exercise in futility.  That every person in society should be shown the most basic level of courtesy for living a dignified life is something that a person should be instilled in from childhood.  If these obscene people haven’t learned this simple rule by the time they have reached an age in which society expects them to act civilly, nothing anyone says will make the slightest of difference.  If they could understand, they wouldn’t be acting in such repulsive manner in the first place.

If there is any justice in this world, these people would disappear from the face of the earth.  In some ways, they are worse than terrorists who strap bombs to babies to blow innocent people up.  A society that hasn’t completely lost its grip on the sense of right and wrong vilifies terrorists and condemns their conduct.  Their outrageous conduct is accompanied by an appropriately outraged response.

Far too often, the same is not true with the indecent human beings of our own community.  Many such people get respected, worshipped, followed and idolized despite their despicable nature or, worse, because of it.  Perhaps their money, power, stature, fame and/or intelligence have allure or serve as some form of a hopelessly misguided notion of success.

That disgusts me.

The hard reality is that there’s nothing I can do about living in a purportedly civilized society which treats the scums, not with the contempt that they deserve, but with respect that are wholly unwarranted.

But I can do something about the immediate environment around me.  I have long ago promised myself that I am going to disassociate myself from any and all dealings with any indecent people, ignore them, refuse to acknowledge their existence and have them go their pathetic, little lives in which the value they place on themselves is at the expense of others.  By doing so, I’m going to try as hell to ensure that their smug satisfaction won’t come at the expense of me and the kind, caring, righteous, virtuous, decent people who surround me.