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.)