In the past few years I’ve seen time and again that we are living in the Age of Entitlement. Mike refers to our city in particular as the Land of Spoiled Children — same idea, really. I witnessed a typical Entitlement/Spoiled Child interaction earlier this week…
As I stood at a busy bus stop downtown I noticed a large 4×4 long-bed truck parked in such a way that the rear tires and about a third of the truck bed were hanging into the clearly marked bus stop area. Just as I was thinking about this selfish act, a parking enforcement officer shows up and starts to document the infraction in preparation for issuing a ticket. I love it when karma works so quickly. What I don’t usually get to see is the next part of the interaction — the truck owner shows up. Now, points go to the driver for being civil even as he was clearly annoyed (I suspect this is because he had a child in tow). He asked how come he was getting a ticket because, “When [he] pulled in, [he] didn’t have a choice — the car ahead was blocking part of the space [he] wanted.” The officer held his ground and told him the ticket stood.
The thing is, the driver should have moved on to find another parking space; he parked knowing that he was over the line and that his vehicle did not fit inside the space as available. Instead, he saw a space and felt entitled to that space, regardless of any other factors. Oddly, I doubt he would have tried to shoehorn his truck into a space between two cars but hanging into a bus stop didn’t affect him or his vehicle so it was fair game.
Parking poorly is a typical indicator of an over-active sense of entitlement. Don’t believe me? Check out the photo pools on Flickr of Bad Parking and You Park Like an A**hole. While it’s likely some of these people never learned the finesse of parking, many purposely park over two spaces like this driver:
This perfectly illustrates the “I’m the most important person in the whole world” concept — this driver clearly believes they deserve more space than any other vehicle.
For the last several hours, I have had my Edit Post window open, trying to explain the core of this shift in our society where it seems to be not only acceptable but expected that people are rude and demanding and self-centred. I went off on various tangents but ultimately it doesn’t matter why just how (or if) we can adjust this crash course. It may be as simple as this: people need to grow up. It seems that many of my peers (Gen X) and those in the generations behind me (Gen Y and the Millennials) forgot this step.