Consider Me Considering You! (Consider this too...)

In consideration of others.

It is another credo of mine.

Yet I ... have been inconsiderate of others, (albeit... unknowingly!).

I will give you an example.

I would NOT turn on my head lights before dark. One half hour before sunset.

That is our law.

If I needed to, I would use the other front lights, some call them parking lights, until it got dark.

One day a lady told me that when the weather was gray, she could not see cars in the distance unless the headlights were on.

I had never considered that before.

Gray cars, gray weather, bad eye sight.

Once made aware of something, I am forced to consider it.

If I don't, then I am being inconsiderate.

Courtesy and consideration. It makes the world a better place. So let's be more courteous and considerate.

The most egregious of courtesy infractions, it would seem to me, are those that happen while driving.

It's one thing to be rude, but quite another thing to endanger the lives of innocent people, in order to indulge your need for speed.

I will drive 30 miles on surface streets, before I will get onto a highway. I avoid them.

I'll admit that it is primarily a function of avoiding traffic build-ups.

But it is most especially a function of avoiding people that don't have the decency or the courtesy to drive like a civilized human.

I don't have to tell you about the mayhem on the highways. You've been there.

This is, after all, the decade that we started bringing guns onto the roadways.

People starting fights and bringing weapons. And bad attitudes. While driving 80mph!

I get why we leave work and drive fast. To get home, to our stuff, as George Carlin used to say.

But people that drive recklessly in the morning, are in a hurry to get to work.

Why would anyone be in a hurry to get to work!

I take a slow back road in, enjoy the sunrise, breathe in the (relatively) clean morning air, and get to work relaxed and refreshed.

And it's not just the speed and the dangerous maneuvers. It's one thing to sit in your car and play candy crush. It's another thing to be in the pole position at the stop light, holding up traffic playing candy crush after the light turns green.

It's one thing to enjoy your music while driving. It's another thing to play it so loud that you set off car alarms and rattle my walls.

I also don't have to tell you, that driving is not the only place we see a lack of consideration. (It's everywhere, really..)

Chivalry. Manners. Respect. We're much too busy for formalities. Young people today are so completely enamored with the 'equality of the sexes', that a man will let a door slam in my face, before he would consider holding it open for me. I have done many kind things for people who are even too busy just to say 'Thank you'. I have sent simple emails and cards, to people that are apparently too busy to offer a simple response. I was telling someone today, that I spent two months making hand-made cards, and sent 200 of them to every one I knew, to commemorate the new year for 2000.

NOT ONE RESPONSE. NOTHING. "Hello. Thank you. Ooh these cards are so nice. Thank you for thinking of me. Happy new year. Haven't heard from you in ages. Did you make these yourself. I just loved it and hung it on the refrigerator..."

200 people! Nothing! Not a word.

I spent most of that year hurt and in shock, and never again, to this day, have I ever sent out another holiday greeting card. Of any kind. To anyone.

Whether I know you or not, I will consider your needs over my own in every instance. Always been that way.

I likely would have had a much more prosperous and fruitful life, had I not been so busy caring about the needs of others.

I knew no other way to do God's work, than to care about the well-being of people everywhere. And I cared about not much more than that.

Dare I say this...? What the parents and the teachers don't teach, was supposed to come from God!

The Heavenly Host.

Ignore the religion if you choose. But the concepts of religion were supposed to teach us what we needed to know, in order to live well on our planet and amongst one another.

“So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets." -Matthew 7:12

If we don't care about anyone but ourselves, we aren't inclined to be concerned with the needs of others.

So let's get to the place where we are TEACHING our children how to be decent human beings!

Is there anyone among you that feels these important fundamentals are already being sufficiently taught?

Do we deny that our people today are missing many of the basics?

It has to be taught. Not assumed.

The premise is to encourage kindness. Foster fellowship. Reconnect with one another.

In case you didn't see this coming - A proper education would most assuredly involve the teaching of courtesy.

When children are not fully educated, we wind up in a world of self-important, inconsiderate, self-absorbed, angry, misguided, unpleasant people, (not necessarily limited to Congress).

How long will it be before we realize that our kids won't do the things we don't teach them...?