Compassion is Slipping Away in Some Places I hear and read a lot of things on the news and when I was young there was a newscaster named Walter Cronkite. When Cronkite talked everyone listened. Whatever he said was taken for gospel. He was one of the most popular news casters in the history of the news. Today it is hard to believe anything we are told without having to check it out first. We have news outlets everywhere today but when I was young there was only radio and the newspapers. The Daily News used to also have a night owl edition and mail used to be delivered 2 times daily. It seems to me, compared to today, business was more people oriented. People took more pride in what they did. Take doctor’s offices for example. It is much harder to go to a doctor’s office today than it was in the past. First of all, there are reams of paperwork to fill out for each visit and some make you fill out endless screens on a computer. If you are one of the elderly it gets embarrassing when you can’t do it. Then there is the process of calling for the date for the appointment, where you are given a date in the distant future and told if you have an emergency before that, you have to go to the hospital. On top of that some offices seem not to care about updating prescriptions when the drug store calls which then makes you have to call the doctor’s office a couple of times just to get your medicine refilled. I am not saying everywhere you go, people don’t care, but I am saying there seems to be far more workers who don’t care than in the past. There was more of a personal connection with small businesses in the past. When I was little not everyone had a phone. It was considered a luxury and expensive. It is one of the areas where the price for a phone call has actually gone down. In the old days one could easily spend their entire weekly earnings on a long distance call. Today there are ways to make calls all over the world for free. Take Facebook Messenger for example. It is routine and free to use it. There was a candy store under the apartment building I lived in and the owner used to take calls for people in the building which was only a six family and call up to them when they had a call. Who would do this today? When the family had weddings, the store owners would be invited. If you were lucky enough to own a car it was usually very old. When you went to the neighborhood mechanic, he would fix what you asked and if you were worried about something else, he would be very honest and tell you if the repair could wait instead of trying to get as much out of you as he could. People trusted each other and all the doors were unlocked. It was a different time indeed. The people in the neighborhood were very poor and almost none of them could pay for groceries so the stores would let people run up a tab and wait until they got paid to clear their bill. Guess what, it actually worked out very well. I don’t know of any cases in my old neighborhood at the time where people ever tried to stick the store owners. There was none of that feeling that life owed them something so they weren’t going to pay. There wasn’t a lot of shoplifting going on either. Police were different in those days. If a cop saw a kid doing something wrong, he would kit them in the butt or give them a good rap. None of the parents complained about this, the feeling among parents was the kid deserved it. If the kid would dare to complain to his parents, his father would give him another rap or worse. Can you imagine how much trouble a cop would be in today for doing that? I’ll tell you one thing, there was nowhere as much gang violence as there is today and this may be one of the reasons. In the old days drug use was far less than today. Even in the poor neighborhood I lived in, in Brooklyn it didn’t exist at the time or was so minor I never saw it. Kids from all over the neighborhood would come together to play in the streets. It didn’t matter who they were or what color we just had fun. Today in some areas you see no kids outside at all, they are all inside playing computer games. In other areas gangs control the streets and there is a chance of getting shot if you go out and even if you stay in. Chicago has proved that. Look at all the children that get shot there every week. I just saw where the mayor was running again. If she gets elected again after all those people being shot in the city this year, I will never understand it. One thing which it seems is disappearing is cursive writing. People used to take pride in how their handwriting looked. If we look in old books, such as the ledgers in court houses one can’t help but notice how neat and fancy the writing in these books is. I heard people say the schools just don’t care about this anymore. One thing I don’t ever remember seeing in my neighborhood was people living on the sidewalk and some of these people were so poor they couldn’t afford shoes. Today there are so many people who need help and are on the streets. People who had mental problems were put into mental hospitals for help. One famous mental hospital in New York on Long Island was Creedmoor Hospital. It contained over 10,000 patients at one time and the last time I checked was down to 600. Where did these patients go? On to the streets so the government could save the cost of housing them. The trend seems to be thinking of ourselves first and not of others at all. It is time we went back to some of our older principles and treated our brothers and sisters better and with more compassion. Religion also seems to be getting pushed out of the equation and along with it God. Someone once said if a person was not God fearing, he or she wouldn’t have much brotherly love. We should try and put ourselves in the place others are in when dealing with them.
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