I’ve got my priorities straight. My priorities should be your priorities. What I think is important is what you should think is important, at least in the public arena. In the privacy of your own home, I guess, it is probably okay for you to watch the Macramé Channel instead of the NFL Network, which is what I watch. But out in the world where your actions affect others, most notably me, you ought to act exactly as I act. This truth, in the callowness of my youth, I held to be self-evident.
I now know that my priorities need not be, and probably aren’t, yours. Self-evidence is, I’ve learned, a shifting proposition.
Take, as an example, littering. I place a high priority in littering abstinence. Discarding unwanted items willy-nilly debases parks, beaches and the rural landscape, reduces the pleasure of walking city streets, creates more work for overburdened clean-up crews and is generally rude. (By the way, I’ve always wanted to use the term ‘willy-nilly’. Do you know the origin of that phrase? Well, it seems that in the olden days… Oh.... Perhaps we can discuss that later.)
I have been known to accost perfect strangers who have littered, sometimes in a light-hearted way, sometimes not. Once as I walked past a sidewalk café, a diner tossed a spent match onto the street, to the obvious consternation of her companion. I picked up the match and returned it to the tosser as if she had dropped it inadvertently. I was smiling, she and her companion were smiling and we all enjoyed the moment. But, I hope she doesn’t mis-step in that manner again.
In another incident, as I sat on a bench in an airport, I saw a man purposefully discard a used boarding pass on the floor. As he hurried on, I retrieved the pass and followed him, calling that he must have dropped this important document. He turned to me and denied that he had dropped it. I insisted that I was sure that he had and was glad of the opportunity to restore it to his possession. After a bit of back and forth along these lines, he took the pass and stalked off. Mission complete.
The most striking incident and the one that brought home to me most compellingly the difference in priorities among us all, occurred one late evening when I was in my mid-twenties. I was sitting in an old-fashioned diner and felt much like a patron in Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks. As I drifted my fries through a trough of ketchup, an obviously starving vagrant came in and asked for a hamburger. He was filthy, dressed in rags and seemed desperate and yet terrified to ask for food.
The fry cook produced a baseball bat from under the counter and chased the vagrant from the restaurant. I don’t know if I was more shocked by the desperation in the vagrant or in the reaction of the cook. As I finished my hamburger, fries and milkshake, I ordered a hamburger to go. The fry cook gave me a condescending look, but produced and bagged my order.
I found the vagrant about a block away and offered him the hamburger bag. He grabbed it and turned away to harbor it against any attempt to take it from him. He ripped the burger from the bag, which he threw into the gutter. I found myself becoming angry, first because he didn’t thank me for the gift and second because he had littered.
As I drove home, well fed, to my comfortable apartment, I thought through what had happened. Clearly the vagrant’s priorities were to take, protect and eat the hamburger. The niceties of polite discourse and the public good of proper debris disposal did not rank at all on his priority list. Even though they weren’t mine, I realized that, for him, he had his priorities straight.