Words from WW Blog

WORDS FROM W.W.                                                    October 20, 2018

Entitlement detoured leads to rage!

This week a 49 year old man was enraged by the fact that another car was traveling too slow in the left hand lane. He raced around the car, pulled in front, and stopped. The man got out of his car and approached the other vehicle. A man who had been seated in the front passenger seat got out and explained that his daughter, who had been driving, was learning to drive. The 49 year old was upset that she had been driving slow in the fast lane, to which the father replied that she had done nothing wrong.

The 49 year old began to physically assault the father. The daughter, who had taken a picture of the man’s license plate, was then assaulted by the man and his wife!

What put a guy over the edge? His sense of entitlement! He believed he was entitled to drive like a maniac in the left lane and someone else was keeping him from doing that! It probably meant that he would arrive third seconds later at his destination than he felt entitled to!

I discovered this statistic. In 2016 road rage was involved in 10% of the automobile fatalities in Colorado!

Entitlement is the new rage and the new form of snobbishness! It says that what a person wants is more important that what is reasonable and appropriate.

Entitlement is surfacing all over the place in our culture. It’s in the little things and the big situations. Yesterday I needed a bag of Winterizer for the lawn so I went to Lowe’s. There was a space fairly close to the store that I pulled into. When I came back out of the store a woman in her fifties, parked in the first space, was putting her purchases in the back of her vehicle. She had a cart full. After she emptied the cart she pushed it two feet, half onto the rocked area and half still on the parking space. All she needed to do was to push it another ten feet to the front of the store or thirty feet to the cart corral. I wanted to ask her if that was what her mom had taught her? I thought about taking the cart back for her, but that would have been just as insulting since she had already decided to leave it halfway on the curb. 

I know, I know! Such a little thing! But it points to the bigger issue. What helps keep rhythm in our community is not as valued as what a person wants regardless of its impact on others. That lady made it difficult for someone else to park in that spot until the cart was moved, but she didn’t care. It was someone else’s problem!

Entitlement has shoved the importance of “being community” to the side. Community requires mutual respect and concern.

In the book of Acts there’s a description of the early church, a group of Jesus followers who met in the Jerusalem temple courts. Acts 4:32 describes the group this way:

     “All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had.” 

An incident that is told in the very next chapter of Acts revealed that “community” can be a very fragile existence when personal gain enters the picture, but for a while the first church, despised and persecuted by many, depended upon its sense of community for its very existence.

Perhaps that sense of needing one another, no matter how we might differ, can be rediscovered before our rage over the ridiculous curses us.