This week in the news a Southwest employee was hospitalized after a passenger punched her in the face with her fist. We have been hearing about the attacks on flight attendants since the beginning of the pandemic. My daughter recently flew home from college. As I booked her ticket I had to agree to the mask mandates put in place by JetBlue. In addition I received at least two emails leading up to her departure reminding me of same. I also had to agree to the protocols as I checked her in, not to mention the signs all over the airport. Yet there are people who refuse to wear masks on the plane and think it is ok to disrupt the other passengers as well as abuse and get physical with the flight attendants. We see this every day. People yelling and screaming at waiters, retail workers, store owners, etc. Last week a customer in Texas threw hot soup in the face of a cashier. The top of the soup had melted. The store offered her another container of soup or a refund but the customer decided instead to throw the soup in the cashier’s face. In what world is this acceptable behavior.
The pandemic has taken a toll on all of us. That is not an excuse for bad behavior. It is simply not ok to treat anyone with disrespect. Every time I see something on the news it makes me cringe.
I’m hanging on by a thread. I think most of us are. Our lives are in total upheavel. We are politically divided as a country. Prices are up, people are struggling and we have a major shortage of workers in both the retail and service industries. Times are tough.
We need to start healing and the first step in healing is kindness and respect. Two things that might I mention are free. It does not cost a dime to be kind to someone else.
When I go out to eat and the service is taking longer than it should, I remind myself that I am blessed enough to afford to go out to eat. There are a lot of people who don’t know where their next meal is coming from. I am blessed enough to afford to go out to eat so the least I can do is be kind to the person who decided to show up and work to serve me.
I recently ate out and there was only one server. She was running around like a chicken without a head, she could not have worked any faster. The people behind me were relentless. They kept berating her for taking too long, for the food not coming out fast enough, because she forgot to bring them additional napkins. They never stopped and I heard them say when they got their check ” this will be reflected in her tip.” I felt so bad for her that I ended up giving her an additional tip on my end; she was doing the best that she could. If they had just put themselves in her place for one minute maybe they might have realized how difficult they were being.
A restaurant in Cape Cod closed for a “day of kindness” because of all the verbal abuse their staff had been putting up with. When did we begin having to tell people to be nice??
Being kind is not at all passive and meek. It is not just being nice and sweet. Being kind means that we realize that all of us are struggling and that spewing hate only adds to more hate. Being kind to strangers, to servers, to customer service workers means that we realize that we are all in this together. All of us are just trying to get through things. Being kind is an awareness that we are all somehow connected. “Being kind to others, it not only changes you, it changes the world.” – Harold Kushner
Accidental Harmony 