Object Lessons...and They Didn't Even Realize It

I'm often thankful for selfish people. They provide great object lessons for my kids. I can point out what selfishness looks like from outside and even the kids can understand why only looking out for number one is just an all-around bad idea.

We just got back from a week's vacation in Branson and I'm always amazed at the grandiose display of self-centeredness of A Gaggle Of Americans On Vacation. Besides the obvious lack of analytical skills (which becomes apparent when folks are called upon to make quick decisions in heavy traffic…it becomes obvious who can think on their feet and who can't), I'm always struck by the sheer selfishness of some people.

We took the kids to WhiteWater, a ginormous swimming pool (with a wave pool, tubes, and the like) one day last week. I'm still paying for that (suffice it to say that years and years in an office with no exposure to sunlight does not adequately prepare one for five hours of scalding Missouri sunshine…and I do mean scalding). In the wave pool, the facility provides a great many inflatable inner tubes, to be shared by the guests. The system is simple and works fairly well: you show up at the wave pool when the wave machine is just shutting off and some people decide to go off to some other part of the park. If you stand around and look pitiful, you're likely to get someone to offer you their inner tube, which you politely thank them for, and you pass the favor on to the next person when the wave machine shuts off the next time around. It's not complicated. There are no lists and no enforcement. It's just a system based on human politeness and common sense.

Enter the cranky grandmother. Apparently, some family decided that they didn't want to have to wait for an inner tube to become available, so they heisted a couple of them from the wave pool and stacked them up under a tree and posted their cranky grandmother as sentry to guard them from being filched.

We all had a good laugh at their expense and it was a nice object lesson in why being selfish is patently unnecessary. It's also nice to have an objective example to show the kids that selfish people are always cranky (have you ever met someone you came to know as utterly self-centered and discovered that they were fabulously well-adjusted and just generally happy people?).

Enough of the soap box. This post is filed in Pointless Pontification anyway because human selfishness defies all attempts to stomp it out—in your kids or someone else's—and it's something we're all guilty of.

Here's some pics I took last week: