Friday, July 11, 2008

(In)Gratitude

As I walked towards the TODAY daily vendor who is an old man religiously distributing the dailies everyday (except Sunday) at the MRT station near my home, an equally old man walked towards the vendor and instead of taking his share of the dailies, he blatantly and in a blithe disregard for the public and the vendor, launched a verbal spat with the old man.

‘Its not yours, not your papers’ he rattled off quickly and equally quickly walked off, leaving the old vendor pretty confounded and astonished. Seeing the commotion and the display of the childish behaviour by the old man, I was quite surprised and somehow bemused.

It was easy to postulate that the old man has a grudge towards the vendor, and in my opinion, I believed the old aggressor might have, on yesterday, ‘jumped the queue’ in getting the dailies before being chastised by the vendor. The aggressor hence bored a grudge towards the vendor and decided to hatch today’s public display of his hatred to nurse his grudge towards the vendor.

It is sad to see an old man, whose time may just be tens of years away, who has weathered the decades and gathered experiences of life, so fixated with small grudges and it might be even sad if he really ‘jumped the queue’: a negative social behaviour.

Rain or shine, the TODAY vendors are always there at the MRT stations distributing our daily bread for the brain. Instead of displaying gratitude towards them by just doing our simple part to queue correctly and patiently and at times or even always thanking them, I have seen a modicum number of Singaporeans refusing to queue up and when told to do queue by the newspapers vendor, all foul language emanated from their mouths.

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