I had occasion to overhear a conversation among some college students. Some sorority girl types were chatting before class. Said one, “I was walking down the hall and Ashley smiled at me. I didn’t smile back. I don’t like her.”
My own daughter, now age 23, told me similar stories of people ignoring her in high school when she said hi to them. I didn’t necessarily believe her. Surely there is some tiny bit of civility among young people. And these are college kids, not teenagers.
It seems to me the issue is not seeing value in those who are not like you, and I would venture to guess, being fearful of those who don’t follow social norms. I don’t know what Ashley did to incur such petty rudeness. I don’t think anyone deserves to be treated that way. In the long run, the sorority girls lose out, since they don’t get to meet a lot of people who might enrich their narrow experience.
All of us lose out though. We have groups of people in America who see no reason to interact with those who are different. It leads to the kind of polarization we see in our politics. The sorority girls become soccer moms, send their kids to private school so they don’t have to mix with those people, and vote no on public transportation, because they would never put themselves in a subway car with those people.
The important thing the sorority girls are telling us is that they have very poor social skills, and little interest in acquiring them. Imagine being a gawky nerd in a high school dominated by these creatures. We wonder why angry young men barely holding it together mentally might take a Bushmaster and start shooting at those who torture them, or even worse, murder the innocent first graders who who represent hope for the future.
We could be working with young people in schools so they develop trust, tolerance of difference, and the ability to communicate across ethnic and social divides. But no, the mania for testing and accountability has led us to ruthlessly sort out the winners from the losers, and discard those who don’t reach academic or social targets. They become test scores rather than human beings.
The problem with treating people as objects is that it damages them. It is not any way to create a society we want to live in.