While I was sharing a lift with three strange eight-year-olds yesterday, one of them spat on the floor next to me. I told him I thought that was a disgusting thing to do, and as I exited the lift he squirted my clothes with some horrible gunge. Was I right to say something?
You were certainly right to say something. It is a sad fact that when confronted by provocative antisocial behaviour from strangers, many of us — instead of boldly tackling them about their boorishness, as we have every right to do — respond by staring intently at our shoes as if we might be practising some kind of footwear hypnosis, saying nothing, breathing very quietly so as not to create any distraction whatsoever and hoping that the elevator doors open again before the yobs pummel us to a pulp. That’s certainly MY response.
So the rest of us are relying on you to take a stand, and hope only that your pockets are deep enough to afford the dry-cleaning bills such stands are evidently likely to entail.
It’s war, but on a smaller scale. We don’t like to think of ourselves as appeasers. But if we lack the stomach for a fight, do we have any right to whine when the barbarians take over the castle? We tackle our pusillanimity in two key ways. First, by electing politicians to do the fighting for us (when John Reid became Home Secretary, many were hoping he would actually patrol lawless streets, meting out justice to thugs in person). The second way is by periodically venting our frustration on call-centre workers in India and Jakarta, because (a) we know that these people are too far away to come and hit us, and (b) they have such a scant grasp of our bank affairs that we guess they won’t know how to siphon funds out of our account by way of revenge.
FACING A DILEMMA
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Have you a dilemma of your own? Write to Modern Morals, Times Features, 1 Pennington Street, London, E98 1TT. Email: modernmorals@thetimes.co.uk