Sometimes it’s the little things that give me hope in the younger generation.
I was at Pine Centre a few days ago, and a young fellow with a backpack on was waiting by one of the marked crosswalks. I stopped, he made sure there was nobody coming the other way who wasn’t worried about little things like the law, then hustled across, waving to me as he passed.
Then there was the young woman at a local restaurant who held the door open for the rest of her family, as well as a couple of seniors who weren’t part of her group.
These are little things, but they are the sorts of things that show me some young people are being brought up to respect others.
It’s not just respecting others that I see in some younger people. I was at White Spot on Saturday, and saw a group of four or five young people in one of the booths. They were chatting with each other, not each on their own cellphone, talking to people who weren’t present and ignoring the people they were having a meal with.
My own rule for cellphones at the table is that I don’t look at it during the meal without permission from the person I’m with. Sometimes something comes up in conversation that we would like to have an answer for, such as what time or what day a local event is happening, and then I will use my phone to check.
I don’t usually spend two or three hours at a meal, and I figure anybody who’s calling me can wait 20 or 30 minutes for me to get back to them.
Of course, just as I have hoped in the younger generation because of the little things some of them do, I sometimes worry about other generations for the same reason.
On the same trip to Pine Centre I mentioned earlier, I saw two people who looked to be in their 30s walking down the middle of one of the lanes in the parking lot.
Not crossing from one side to the other; walking right down the middle to obstruct traffic as best they could.
Is there some way we can skip a generation in terms of who runs things around here?
