That's Why

"Really big people are, above everything else, courteous, considerate and generous - not just to some people in some circumstances - but to everyone all the time."
Thomas J. Watson 1874-1956, Founder of IBM

I agree with this statement completely. But I think it goes further. You cannot simply treat people as equals. It is important to believe they really are just as fully human as you yourself are.

That's why I became so angry with a former partner when he inexplicably discarded his veneer of civility and treated a waitress with horrid disdain. When I complained he said, "She's just a servant. What does it matter?" Who convinced him to believe that money and status made you better than anyone else? Was it his uneducated mother, married to the rich man in town who provided her with servants and allowed or encouraged her to go to the butcher shop and demand special treatment? Usually he managed some degree of courtesy, but the real person was the man who appeared to have the brain fart in that restaurant. Its force simply blew away a very thin veneer of good manners.

I also think that by practising being considerate all the time, we become considerate people; by being generous and courteous regularly, the habit becomes so ingrained that we become the people we have been trying to emulate.

That's why I think I didn't do a completely bad job of raising my kids. All my kids are accepting of people. They believe in our Charter of Rights and practise that belief in their daily lives. As youngsters, they joined me on marches to defend the rights of workers and women, and no Newfie jokes were allowed around our dinner table. It was only much later that I realized the substitution of "Stupid Person" for Newfie or Frenchman or woman, revealed a different kind of intolerance.

I really like my friends, at least partly because they are all open hearted and courteous to everyone. And it is never an act, and that's why I was so angry with the most recent man briefly in my life, and ended it before it really began. He looked down on my friends ... and wanted to be treated as someone special because he had published two very mediocre mystery novels. He believed he was better than most people.

That's why I don't get really close to snobs. Oh, some of them are perfectly polite to everyone, but they put up an invisible barrier against those they consider beneath them, a barrier that keeps out the riffraff. I feel uncomfortable around some rich people but not others.

And that's why I like living in the country and in the developing world. There is greater acceptance of people, and a realization that money is not the determining factor in deciding a man's worth. It is also harder to tell from outward appearances just who is a have, who a have not.