Entitlement

Or, Why I Deserve to Act Like an Only Child and Throw Tantrums as an Adult

Well, it's Valentine's Day. A day of love and charity. A day of peace, goodwill and affection toward our fellow men.

A day for a nasty confrontation in a chapel.

Thankfully, I was not the recipient of the drama this time, merely an observer. I'm on campus today at Emory (yay!) getting some work done in Brooks Commons, the lounge area in Cannon Chapel. I like people watching, and it's always interesting when you get to interact with a perfect stranger in a nice way, as a comrade with shared experiences. So I enjoyed chatting with one woman who was on the phone fighting with a DeKalb County school. It sounded as though someone had stolen her son's cafeteria code and was using it during another lunch hour to charge their own lunches. I mentioned that I used to teach in DeKalb, empathized with her situation, and we shared some good ol' fashioned emnity towards the evil entity that is DeKalb County schools. A moment of mutual kindness and generosity.

Then another man was on the phone, this time fighting with someone about his W-2 forms. They gave him a complicated list of instructions, and he had no pen. So I loaned him one quite happily, we abused the govermental machine that is the IRS, and he went back to his conversation.

But then entitlement crept in. And I find the first woman's conversation quite ironic, given that the one of the places I have encountered entitlement the most was in the classroom. May I suggest that if you are planning on teaching in a school where you are the minority ethnicity, find a picture of you with friends, family, etc. that are of the majority ethnicity, frame it, and put it on your desk first thing. Don't worry about a stapler, tape, pencils, or a computer until you have that picture up there. There was many a day when an irate parent tried to cry "Racism!" but was stopped short by seeing my family portrait. But I digress.

The aforementioned gentleman was one ethnicity, and the aforementioned lady was another. But more importantly, the third person who entered the scene was not the same ethnicity as that gentleman. We'll call him Clueless Man, and her, Cranky Lady. You can see where this is headed.

Clueless man was still on his phone, and speaking rather loudly. I ignored it. After the Figo incident, I am far from eager to harrass perfect strangers. But Cranky Lady had had enough of the interruption to her studying, and she asked him to either get off the phone or leave. She lectured. She ranted. And when he finally said, "Fine, I'll go!" and started to storm out, it was really just beginning. The person on the other end of the line (not his previous phone call) must have asked what was going on, because he said, "I just pissed off some lady for being on the phone, so I'm going outside!" She took the bait. Henceforth issued a shouting match that could very well have been enacted in my third-grade classroom:

CL: Well, you're rude!

CM: I'm not rude!

CL: Yes, you are! You don't even belong here! This is for the students!

CM: I'm an alum!

CL: I don't care! You're rude!

CM: Fine! Goodbye!

I didn't know whether to laugh or put them in time out.

The thing that gets me is the sense of entitlement. On both sides, I suppose, but "she started it." The idea that I deserve the room to be at my level of auditory comfort, and if I am inconvenienced or uncomfortable in any way, it is YOUR responsibility to change that, AND I don't have to be nice about it, because the world owes me.

It makes my head explode. Clueless Man seemed nice enough, just ignorant. Cranky Lady could have asked him nicely to lower his volume or to go outside. But that was just too much effort to be expected. Because it's difficult to confront someone nicely, but very self-gratifying to berate a perfect stranger.

Now why did I mention ethnicities? Because 30 seconds after the show ended and the curtain came down, another lady entered, talking loudly on her cell phone. She only talked about 2 minutes and then hung up, and so I suppose that would mostly account for Cranky Lady not jumping on her case, too. But I found it frustratingly interesting that this new person happened to be of the same ethnicity as Cranky Lady. It felt too familiar to similar situations I've seen or been in.

And Clueless Man certainly could have been more gracious and held his tongue. But he didn't; and to be truthful, I probably wouldn't have, either. Although, in the case of the Figo incident, I was too shocked to be rude. Oh, may I be shocked into kindness more often!

When, oh when will we all realize that we are all made in God's image? You certainly don't have to be a professing, "evangelical" Christian to be here at the Candler School of Theology, but it's a reasonable assumption that if you're here, you espouse some system of beliefs that says, "Play nice with others." Especially on consumeristic, bastardized national holidays that are supposed to be about love and kindness.

Well, Happy Valentine's Day. Call your mom, hug your kids, kiss your spouse, and be nice to a stranger.