Dear Editor,
On my recent sojourns around our community, I have seen some disturbing things that I hope are just momentary anomalies and not signs of possible trends.
The other day at a restaurant I saw a young couple sit through an entire meal without once taking out their phones to check for text messages. They spent the whole time talking to each other! A few days later, in a different restaurant, I saw a family of four (two of them teenagers) do exactly the same thing: talking and laughing together and apparently enjoying each other’s company.
Then, on a trip on the Canada Line, I witnessed two strangers strike-up a conversation with each other, and then a young man gave up his seat to an elderly woman with a cane. And this morning at a local mall, I saw a man sitting on a bench reading a newspaper — you know, one of those things made out of paper with writing on it and folded in the middle. People were staring at him, but he didn’t seem to care.
Do these people not get it? We have been working so hard to shake free of such old-fashioned habits and attitudes and yet we still see people refusing to abide by the prevailing conventions of the day.
Perhaps, we should feel some compassion for them and when we see anything like this happening, we should undertake an intervention by waving our pads and phones in front of their eyes so they can see for themselves what the real world is all about.
We have to do what we can to ensure that such behaviours do not become so commonplace that they start to really interfere with our lives. People actually talking to each other — actually talking to strangers! I can only hope that there is an App out there that will help us deal with such issues.
Ray Arnold
Richmond
