I ducked into the supermarket today to quickly grab a few items I needed for Christmas baking. My plans for a quick dash in, down two aisles and back to the checkout were thwarted, however, by a pair of septuagenarians, one pushing a walker and one a trolley, who would stop every four paces in what could only be described as a two person jack-knife as, bent in towards each other, they would closely scan their shopping list and then the shelves next to them. Four paces, repeat.

I was still deliberating over whether I should attempt an Indiana Jones style dive roll between them before the gap closed yet again, or whether it would be faster to simply backtrack, dash down an adjacent aisle, and come back to this one from the other direction to grab what I needed (which was, at this point, just three metres away), when I recalled this article I had read several days ago.

It occurred to me that to fine specimens of humanity like Amy Alkon, the world is made up of two types of people – those who are so entirely saturated in their own self-importance that they believe the world should step aside for them and bend to their every selfish whim, and those who are in a permanent state of internal rage over the perceived selfishness of anyone who deigns to invade their headspace with any form of noise without asking prior permission from those around them.

In reality, there is a third group, of which most of us are members.  Slow moving people annoy me, as do noisy eaters, people with beards (especially if they have food stuck in it *shudder*), anyone wearing those absurd caps with a really flat, wide brim, shrieking children and that weird guy down the road who rolls up one leg of his jeans.  The difference is that I’m not self absorbed enough to believe that the entire world should change to suit my personal preferences, and that I certainly have faults and little idiosyncrasies that possibly annoy society at large (my inability to park straight probably being one of them).

The problem with both extreme groups (including people like Alkon), is that neither can recognise their own selfishness and how it impacts negatively on us all.  In that article I hear condemnation of a mother whose child was being noisy.  I hear how children should stay locked inside until they can learn to be silent in public, and how other people on a plane shouldn’t have to put up with the ‘theft of our attention, our time and our peace of mind’.  What I don’t hear is that anyone else on the plane attempted to distract the child for everyone’s comfort, or the stewardess offering him a snack or a drink to shut him up, or even that the glaringly obvious fact that when you cram yourself into a metal tube with 200 other people you can reasonably expect it won’t be an experience free from interaction with other people.

So we ban children off aircraft, and fat people, and anyone with body odour, and anyone who can’t chew quietly, anyone who farts or coughs or has the hiccoughs, anyone who rustles the newspaper loudly when turning the page.  Anyone who hasn’t taken a crap prior to boarding and might pinch one off into the recycled aircon.  Anyone who sighs loudly when the passenger next to them needs to get up to go to the loo. Anyone who can’t survive less than an eight hour flight without having to get up to use the loo.

And when whomever is left catches their $4000 regional flight is sitting there, enjoying the serenity while internally bitching about the cost of flights and trying to ignore the nagging thought that when they get too old they will probably be farmed off to an understaffed nursing home where nobody visits them and never venture into public again for fear of being vilified for taking up someone else’s precious time by clogging up the sidewalk with their motorised scooter, they might pause to wonder if, in their youth, they should’ve been a little more tolerant of others and a little less self absorbed.