An Open Letter to the World

Stop It.

Stop talking on your cellphone in the library.  Stop standing too close behind the person using the ATM.  Stop bringing your six month old baby to MOMA.  Stop talking on your cellphone about your cousin’s Irritable Bowel Syndrome while in line at the post office.  Stop leaving your dog in the backyard so it barks every twenty minutes.  Stop getting tattoos on your face.  Oh, and while we’re on the subject of your face, stop letting your nose and eyebrow hair grow to a length only acceptable on mad scientists.  Stop slacking on the gym and personal hygiene.  Stop getting drunk and singing the theme song from The Jeffersons at top volume in the bar.  Stop tailgaiting.  Stop leaving your blinker on.  Stop bringing your kid on the airplane and then letting him kick my seat for four hours.  Stop checking your Blackberry while you’re driving.  Stop watching Flavor of Love.  Stop dressing like you’re 21.  Stop taking drugs, or at least stop taking so many that you’re bothering the people around you.  Stop acting crazy.  Stop wearing that “Mustache Rides, 25¢” T-shirt.  Stop farting in the elevator.  Stop ignoring that hair growing out of the big mole on your face.  Stop growing out your sideburns.  Stop debating whether or not it’s okay to take your beverage on the plane.  Stop being a vegan.  Stop cooking cabbage in the office microwave at lunchtime.  Stop having conference calls on speakerphone. 

Pull Yourself Together.  

We’re living in increasingly challenging times—terrorism, war, and global warming, and other sources of bad news are ripping us as a society apart, so now more than ever, we need to pull together as a community, to really “have each others’ backs,” so to speak.  But, for some reason, just when we really need to be on our best behavior, we’re alienating each other in every way possible, from increasingly obnoxious behavior in public to bad reality television to loud cellphone conversations in the library to people who make us nervous because they just can’t seem to pull themselves together.

Schopenhauer once said that whenever we as people engage in behavior that lowers us, we become lower as a society. This would essentially mean that we are ten more years of  road rage and “Flavor of Love” reruns away from being animals again.

So….let’s pull ourselves together, shall we?  If we each identify one thing we might be doing to bring down the social discourse and rectify it, that will go a long way toward making the world a better place.  We’ll stop playing music at 1:00 am, for instance, if you’ll take your dog for a walk so he doesn’t bark every 20 minutes.  And so on.  Hell, you might even want to go nuts and take your neighbors’ trashcans in for them!  You never know what kinds of miracles could occur, just from making these small efforts.

What’s your pet peeve?  What do you wish people would just stop doing? 

• Category: People Baffle Me Sometimes