Goodbye altruism, hello narcissism

As the 21st century continues its often-frightening slog toward God knows what, it seems as if one "ism" in the English language is being marginalized, while another has muscled in to take its place.

Goodbye, altruism. Hello, narcissism.

In a two-hour span one afternoon last week, I experienced, or witnessed, several unrelated incidents that served to remind me of a key fact of contemporary life: self-absorption has become a guiding principle in America.

Sometimes, the dots are easy to connect.

Dot No. 1. While walking our chocolate lab Aquinnah, I passed a flagger who was directing traffic along a two-lane street. He was waving eastbound cars into the westbound lane, because a portion of the eastbound lane up ahead was temporarily closed. When I walked by, the flagger was screaming at a rattled, elderly motorist who wasn’t making the lane change fast enough to suit the flagger. Even after the female driver was long gone, the flagger continued to rant and rave, shouting at the top of his lungs to no one in particular: “Someone like that shouldn’t have a license.” Maybe not, but the flagger's peevish display of megalomania did nothing to calm the nerves of the befuddled driver.

Dot No. 2. A few minutes later, as Aquinnah and I continued our walk on another two-lane street, we came upon a cat. The cat was in the westbound lane of the roadway, near our sidewalk. Aquinnah gets agitated when he spots cats (other than our own). I knew he might lunge and bark once we got close to the cat, which stood quietly in the street, watching us. As this potential confrontation unfolded, two cars came hurtling up the street toward us, heading east. Common sense should have warned them to slow down, in case the cat got scared and darted in front of them. But both drivers continued to exceed the speed limit on this narrow, densely populated city street. Fortunately, Aquinnah was calmer than usual, and the cat stood its ground.

Dot No. 3. As I was driving along a two-lane street in our neighborhood, an oncoming driver in a pickup (the worst motorists usually drive pickups) ignored the dividing line that runs down the middle of the street. The driver’s side of the truck straddled the line, forcing me to pull hard to the right to avoid a collision. I got a good look at this guy’s face as he hogged the middle of the street. He seemed alert, and was focused on the road ahead. He was not visibly distracted. And he appeared to be serenely indifferent to his own reckless behavior. Obviously, it was my job to get out of his way.

Dot No. 4. Once I got back home, I heard a deafening mechanical noise coming from one of the nearby streets. It was so loud and foreign-sounding that I couldn't figure out what kind of machine would make such a racket, so I felt compelled to find out. Tracing the noise to its source, I found a guy using a blower that sounded like a jet engine on steroids to move a few leaves away from his house, a job that could easily have been accomplished with a (soundless) rake. 

Individually, these incidents might not have been noteworthy. But compressed into a short period of time on a small bit of turf in one neighborhood, they suggest that egoism and indifference are widespread. If such behavior is common all across the country (there’s no reason to believe it’s unique to my neighborhood or my city or my state), perhaps we should delete “altruism” from the dictionary. Or at least list it as archaic.