Dear Mr. Rude Entitled Jerk, I Have a Few Things To Say To You

“Hello, this is Officer “T”, the front gate security guard. I wanted to let you know about a situation that is happening.”. In any other normal situation, a person receiving a call like this at 8:30 pm on a Sunday night might start to get worried, but for me, this was just another day in the crazy filled world of being a part of a homeowners association.

I know — I can just hear you saying a lot of things right now about the ills of HOA’s and the crazy people behind those mysterious gates, but those are stories for a later time. This story is less about that, but more about human decency and the character of a person who feels they are entitled to treat others with such vile disrespect.

As the security officer relayed her story, I became more and more disgusted as she described the harassing and threatening treatment bestowed upon her by a resident who lives in the community. This poor guard was just doing her job, following the rules meant to protect the community, when an entitled the-rules-don’t-apply-to-me rude jerk of a resident felt that demeaning a person in a position beneath him was quite an acceptable thing to do.

This not so nice person whose car costs more than what the security officer makes in a year, who has the luxury of living in a safe gated community, and who, by the way, is one of those people who does what he wants when he wants and then complains when he is told he can’t, was relishing in the fact that he had some sort of fantasy-induced mysterious authoritative justification for treating the “help” as less than human. My blood was boiling beyond belief because there is no justification for someone to take their anger and frustration out on someone whose job it is to keep them safe. Somehow I managed to keep my cool and was able to console and calm the officer down.

As my anger at what had happened was replaced with trying to right this wrong, the sadness crept in. I started to think about how terrible it was for an innocent human being to end up being the target of such rude and unacceptable behavior from someone who had no clue (or perhaps he did have a clue) that their treatment would have such a profound effect on someone who did not deserve it. My heart was breaking for the security officer.

We all face times in our lives where we will witness or experience the unkind actions of others, and there are times when we ourselves may unknowingly become unkind and treat others in a way that is unbecoming of a decent human being. However with this situation, I just wanted to shake some common decency into my fellow neighbor and wake him up to the fact that he isn’t as important as his over inflated warped ego led him to believe.

What I really wanted to do was to get on my bedazzled soap box, and try to reason with people like him. But in the end, this situation got me wondering, what if every time we did something, whether good or bad, it was presented to us in a highlight reel at the end of our lives?

So, Mister “I’m too good to follow rules, entitled jerk”, I ask you this; if at the end of your life you were presented with a reel of how you treated people during your time on earth, would you be proud of yourself? Would you be shocked at your behavior towards people who were charged with serving you, or who were in a lower socio-economic class then you? Would it make you feel good about yourself knowing that you were rude, demeaning, and caused others pain and emotional suffering?

At the end of your life, would you like to see how your words affected another person, how you belittled them and caused them to feel bad, and how your actions might have created a ripple effect causing people around you to become insecure and frightened? At the end of your life, would you like to see those scars that you inflicted upon another human being?

Are you proud that your elitist attitude made you feel better about yourself? Did putting down others really elevate your status? Did you not realize that just because someone didn’t have the same education level, the same social status, the same race, religion, or sexual orientation as you, that it didn’t make them any less deserving of respect and kindness?

Honestly, none of us knows what kind of judgement we will end up facing when our time on earth is up. We can be blind to our own actions, but it is the sum of these actions over a lifetime, the daily patterns of our behavior that define whether we are truly a rude, inconsiderate, and entitled person, or if we are in fact a compassionate, giving, and kind person. It is the daily interactions with others who enter our lives, especially those who are not like us, that define if our treatment and attitude is something we should be proud of.

Of course, we will have our slip ups, bad days when we act out of character and become embarrassed with what comes out of our mouths or by our temporary lapse in patience. We are human after all, but if we can learn from our actions, truly apologize, make amends, and change our ways, we can learn to be proud of ourselves.

I don’t know about you, but there are times I fear seeing when I failed at being the person I want to be, those times I may have hurt someone. So I try everyday to be aware of my own actions and to try to set an example of kindness, empathy, and compassion towards others — especially to those who are different from me. Because if I am faced with my own end-of-life highlight reel, I want to be pleasantly surprised, not mortified.

To be proud of our actions and treatment of others is something that I know we all strive for. We can all ask ourselves that same question, “Will I be proud of who I was on the earth, or will I be totally shocked and embarrassed?”. The choice will be up to each of us to decide what we want to see and to be able to correct our course if we find ourselves veering away from the person we really want to be.

So, Mister “I don’t play by the rules, entitled jerk”, before I step off my bedazzled soap box, I hope you will change. I hope you will be surprised in the end that you were given the opportunity to show kindness, to show respect to those you once didn’t find worthy, and did. I hope you will have learned to have patience and learned to treat everyone as a human being. Because in the end, if I don’t have that hope for you, what does that say about my character?

And, yes, I hope that I am also forgiven for giving a certain someone a certain pet name. I, too, have lessons to learn before my time on earth is up and my highlight reel is played.