HomeCrazzyHome

When looking at the definitions of R-E-S-P-E-C-T, it seems there were variations of two themes…

• a feeling of deep admiration for someone or something elicited by their abilities, qualities, or achievements…OR…
• politeness, honour, and care shown towards someone or something that is considered important.

Then there was the shockingly accurate one…the one that you hear way too much about…

Behavior intended to please your parents (Vocabulary.com)

Parents…grandparents…teachers…police…older people…AUTHORITY figures. Period.

Let’s look at each of those in turn…beginning with that last one.

“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”

Do you know who said that?

Socrates…400 years BC…before Christ…almost 2500 years ago. Yet somehow civilization has survived. In fact, in that time we have…

• Outlawed slavery in most of the world (not saying it does not exist just that it is against the law)…
• Sent men to the moon…
• Created computers which can solve equations in less than a second that would have taken lifetimes for the mathematicians of that age…
• Learned that it is bacteria and viruses and not ‘ill-humors’ which cause disease…

And much much more.

Of course, we continue to have our problems…

• The rich keep getting richer…and the poor poorer…
• Wars…
• Famine…
• Natural disaster…and the man-made ones of our environment as well…

But it puts it into perspective that the greatest mind of his time was making the exact same argument two and a half millennia ago as we hear from politicians, educators, and pretty much everyone over thirty on the street every single day.

But that is just one side of the argument…

What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new. Old people did not know enough once, perchance, to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire a-going; new people put a little dry wood under a pot, and are whirled round the globe with the speed of birds, in a way to kill old people, as the phrase is. Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost. One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute value by living. Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the young, their own experience has been so partial, and their lives have been such miserable failures, for private reasons, as they must believe; and it may be that they have some faith left which belies that experience, and they are only less young than they were. I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me anything to the purpose. Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me; but it does not avail me that they have tried it. If I have any experience which I think valuable, I am sure to reflect that this my Mentors said nothing about. Walden by Henry David Thoreau (1854)

Which is right? Socrates…it is all the youth’s fault? Or Thoreau…it is the old people who have screwed up the world? Both? Neither? A matter of personal belief and interpretation? Irrelevant?

The question is…

Is behavior intended to please others truly respect?

Or is it obedience? Control and conditioning?

Which only leads into the next definition…