Thursday, May 18, 2006

parents didn't teach you any manners, is it?

i had to go to town on two separate occasions recently, and i took the commuter train and the light rail transit. youngsters in malaysia nowadays don't really have much manners. it is already a sad situation when we need signages to be posted on the trains to give up certain allocated seats to the elderly, the expectant mothers and the handicapped. i mean, i understand the allocated seats, as they are near the exits, but the signages?

what's even worse is, with all these signages, youngsters are STILL hogging these seats and the elderly, the pregnant and handicapped STANDS. even if the young are illiterate, they should have the home education of manners and courtesy.

while in the train today, an elderly malay man had to give up his seat for a blind man. how did we know that he's blind? he had the cane. you know, the foldable blind man cane that everyone recognises at once. yet the young bastards around are continuing with their own business of nonchalance.

today i had my senior citizen mom with me, and an indian gentleman gave up his seat for her instantly and when i thanked him, he told me that i'm most welcomed. sure gave a nice warm feeling of the goodness in people. this chap is shorter than i am and he had a briefcase-sized bag with him. he could barely hang on to the straps dangling from the ceiling of the carriage roof to hold on to. he looked and sounded like a citizen of india. if he really is, it makes me cringe to call myself a malaysian. what kind of image are we putting out there to the foreigners? we've always been portrayed as warm, friendly and COURTEOUS. where's the malaysian common courtesy in this?

i don't want to point fingers here, but the majority of the people who rides the commuter trains and the LRT are of a certain race, therefore they obviously bag a bigger percentage of having no common courtesy. are they always the culprits? what about the rest of them? take a ride yourself and find out.

1 comment:

Junkgirl™ said...

I'm totally with you on this, Corey. Somehow the younger generation are less courteous or should I be more sarcatstic - less 'civilized' even though they may be more trendy & IT savvy. Us being the 'older' generation, by which I don't mean old literally, are more considerate, more 'human' and have more 'feelings'. Things like general courtesy is something we didn't have to learn in school. It's just inside us, well most of us.
But the youngs ones now, like you said, are an embarrassment to us and themselves. Maybe they've lost their human touch due to too much computing and technology. You know they are around machines more than they are around people so they become like machines themselves and machines don't have senses and feelings.
Sometimes I wonder what the future generation will be like.