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1 Text A
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3 Chinese Version
Text A
Today, we seem to behave worse to one another than we ever have before. What used to be common decency has become uncommon now. It seems that we have become a society where lack of consideration is the norm, where it is entirely legitimate to care only about oneself. This is a grim picture. Yet as members of society, couldn’t we do something to make a change?
Uncommon Decency
Harry Stein
1 It was one of those days that mercifully seem to come to New York just once each spring, a day of rain so heavy that it obscured vision and rushed over gutters onto sidewalks.
2 I was late, and more than a little annoyed; there was no shelter at the Seventy-sixth Street and Lexington Avenue bus stop, where I waited, and my umbrella, too, was threatening to collapse.
3 Finally the bus arrived. I handed the driver my transfer, wiped the water from my glasses, and began to move toward the rear.
4 “Hey buddy,” came the shout.
5 I continued walking.
6 “Hey, you, get back here!”
7 I noticed a few pairs of eyes staring my way. “Are you talking to me?” I asked.
8 “Who does it look like I’m talking to?” The driver motioned me back. “That’ll be fifty cents. This transfer is valid only if you catch the bus at Seventy-ninth Street.” Technically he was, of course, correct; such a regulation certainly exists in a book somewhere.
9 “But I get on here all the time,” I protested.
10 “I don’t give a damn what you do. Fifty cents or get off the bus.”
11 So I gave him his half a buck—and a good deal more than that in abuse. “You know,” I said, taking a seat behind him, “it’s people like you who give this city such a lousy reputation. What’s the difference if I get on here—especially on a day like this?”
12 There was no response. Indeed, with the wall of plastic between us, I was not even sure he’d heard. “You son of a bitch,” I muttered.
13 He had heard. A moment later a huge hand was on my shoulder. “One more word from you and I’m throwing you off. I don’t have to take that from no one.”
14 For the rest of the ride I reserved my comments for the elderly gentleman beside me. I said that I hoped I had ruined the driver’s day.
15 He smiled benignly. “That’s not a very nice sentiment,” he said.
16 “Why shouldn’t I feel that way? He’s ruined mine.”
17 And, indeed, it was hours before that sense of irritation and dismay left me, days before I was able to talk about the encounter without wishing I were massive enough to have dared the guy to throw me off his bus. And it was weeks before it occurred to me that maybe I’d acted almost as badly as he had.
18 Mine was not a particularly strict upbringing, but in our house certain rules of behaviour were never in question. It was assumed that one was always solicitous of people’s feelings and ready to offer comfort, and contemptuous of those who disrespectfully slighted others. “Always,” went my mother’s admonition (which to a four-year-old did not sound like a cliché), “put yourself in the other person’s shoes.”
19 In retrospect, I see that this was, as much as anything else, a matter of politics. My parents, children of immigrants, raised in relative poverty, were of the fervent conviction that the world was divided between people who cared about others and people who did not, between the generous-spirited and the petty, between us and them. Thus, it was that in her sixties my mother spotted from her bedroom window a local newspaper vendor being hustled away by the police for having an improper license. Though quite ill, she dashed out of bed to help him, then spent the next two days phoning city agencies on his behalf.
20 I now realize that it is naïve to estimate the contents of people’s hearts on the basis of their political affiliation, but the principle remains valid: if one is to lay any claim to character, he must live his convictions daily, reflexively, in a hundred tiny ways. “I stopped seeing a man because he was rude to waiters,” reported a woman of my acquaintance, and I understood perfectly. Someone without respect for waiters or salesclerks or business subordinates is unquestionably going to be found wanting on all the big issues.
21 But somehow it seems that fewer and fewer of us are able to manage it. Indeed, we seem to behave worse to one another today than we ever have before. There was a time when certain elementary rules of human intercourse were enforced in this society by popular assent. Just a generation or so ago, virtually no citizen over the age of sixty would ever have been obliged to stand on a crowded bus or subway. Today the public conveyances are full of elderly standees while kids and teenagers and lots of young men and women in designer jeans sit staring blankly ahead. We have, quite simply, become a society where lack of consideration is the norm, where it is entirely legitimate to give a damn only about oneself.
22 What is ultimately most worrisome is not that a lot of old people have to stand on buses but that all of the millions of individual instances of self-absorption threaten to undermine the American tradition of generosity that historically has characterized us as a people. There is a shocking lack of compassion in the land for the unemployed and underprivileged, even among their traditional defenders.
23 What is particularly curious about all of this is that there is a good deal more warmth in the air now than ever before. Every time we dial Information, some operator tells us to have a good day; “Have a Coke and a smile,” recommends one electronic voice; “Reach out, reach out and touch someone,” advises another. It is almost as if the reduction to ad copy of expressions of human need has rendered us less capable of responding to others at all.Incessantly bombarded by platitudes, we simply don’t listen so well anymore or see so clearly or, finally, feel so deeply.
24 It is, to be sure, a grim picture, and there is little reason to believe it will soon change. So we are left with our conscience, each of us having to choose whether we will, in fact, reach out and touch someone or simply continue to look out for ourselves.
25 Those who choose right can do an inestimable amount of good—can, indeed, set even cynical strangers to speculating on the possibilities of the human heart.
26 At dusk on the Friday of Labor Day weekend, 1973, ten miles short of Indianapolis, the old Chevy in which my girlfriend and I had driven from the East Coast to the West and nearly back again finally gave out. Wary and almost out of money, we limped into a gas station off the highway. The owner-mechanic’s diagnosis came in five minutes: our drive shaft was shot; we needed a new one.
27 My face fell. “How much will that cost?” I asked.
28 He studied us—untidy twenty-four-year olds with a pair of anti-Nixon bumper stickers on our useless vehicle—for a moment. “Wait here,” he said. And then, to his assistant, “Eddie, I’ll be back in a while.”
29 Although according to Eddie the place was due to close for the weekend in an hour, the owner was gone for three hours, until after 10:00 P.M., and when he returned it, he had in his hand a drive shaft for our Chevy. A used drive shaft, found, we eventually understood, after a search of every junkyard and auto graveyard in town.
30 “How much do we owe you?” I asked finally. Then, quickly, I added, “We only have thirty-five dollars; we’ll send you the rest.”
31 He furrowed his brow. “Well, let’s see,” he said. “It’ll cost you another fifteen bucks for gas to get to New York, and you’ll need a motel room tonight, and you’ve got to eat…Let’s say seven dollars.”
32 “Seven dollars? That’s ridiculous.”
33 “Nope, seven dollars it is.”
34 After I’d stopped resisting and paid him his money, he clapped a hand on my shoulder and smile a smile I’ll remember years after the bitterness of the run-in with the bus driver has left me.
“Have a good weekend,” he said.
