On my way home one day, I heard a bunch of men having one of these disturbing dialogues. It wasn't what I'd call a conversation. Rather, it was a big ol' gripe fest.
Such griping normally wouldn't annoy me, especially since I know I shouldn't be eavesdropping on others. And after all, people are entitled to vent their feelings and frustrations.
"This plate lunch is greasy and the meat is still moving," for example, would be a legitimate complaint. Or, "My boss is a slave driver and won't even let me go to the bathroom," is acceptable.
But these bus-riding goons pretty much gave up their rights to do this.
In my mind, they stepped into the supreme goon category once they decided it was acceptable to sneak onto the bus through the back door.
These supreme goons, besides complaining about life's woes, were doing an extremely ironic thing. They were tapping women on the shoulder and offering them empty seats.
"I am such a gentleman," they must have been thinking. "Dis definitely makes up fo' not paying da bus fare!"
After a few episodes of dishing out those wonderful offers to the scores of "frail" women circulating in the bus, they started their gripe fest.
I didn't catch much of their discussion, but I do know that part of it touched on a lack of aloha in today's society.
"Yeah, look who's talking," I thought to myself. In fact, hearing those goons was like a blast to the past. My past. It reminded me of high school days in the orchestra.
THE McKinley Orchestra was raw, to put it nicely, with wide differences in ability among students . The one similarity among most of the musicians, however, was an affinity for whining. "Orchestra is sooooo bad. We sound horrible," they'd say.
Such comments usually came from the players for whom a little practice would have done wonders. Nevertheless, they persisted with their complaints, oblivious to the notion that they could have done something to remedy the problem.
It was exasperating to hear them complain incessantly about problems of which they were clearly at the core, especially when they weren't even willing to try and put forth a smidgen of effort to change the situation.
THE years went by, and few members made any attempts to work out the orchestra's difficulties. Basically, these orchestra members didn't practice because they considered it useless and unpleasant. In many cases, they simply quit.
Yet in all that time, those same members found more than enough energy to point out that the orchestra sounded awful. My question is, if it bothered them so much, why didn't they do something about it?
Well, the answer is that it takes a lot less energy to complain than it does to take action.
Little did those people know, the only thing that came of their whining was evidence that they were the perpetual source of the problem which they couldn't stop grumbling about. The worst part was, they didn't seem to know it, and they would never have been able to admit to it.
When individuals submit to this sort of behavior, improvements or solutions are rarely ever accomplished.
It's one of the world's sad realities that there are already a great number of people who have realized and pinpointed the problems in our society that need to be fixed. In order for a change to occur, however, more of those people must take the next step in the process and do something about it.