Attitude … Ask anyone who knows me whether I’m in their “like” or “can’t stand her” category, and they’ll tell you I have attitude. But all of us have it. Some of us simply express it more openly.
Attitude used as a noun, can mean your way of behaving, your manner, outlook, approach, mind-set, thoughts, way of thinking and so on. So attitude affects everything we do and say. You know immediately what someone means when they say a person has a good or bad attitude.
According to my mind-set, the world has a small but powerful and wealthy minority of folks with not only a bad attitude, but with a very, very bad attitude. You notice them immediately because they radiate an aura of arrogance, self-importance and downright selfishness. They also flaunt their attitude.
This minority does not listen to those who speak to them because they have the only opinion that matters. You couldn’t possibly have anything meaningful to say. There is no such thing as compromise or cooperation or finding the middle ground for these folks because their beliefs are built upon the way things should be.
They hold beliefs that fly in the face of goodwill, tolerance, humanity and common sense. They ignore facts and scientists, economists and professionals in fields that this minority knows very little, if anything, about.
Bad attitude folks like to repeat anecdotal tales as often as possible. They decry the current human condition and inform anyone within earshot of the glories of the good old days.
The bad attitude minority shrieks that the sky is falling but the environment is not being affected by human activities. The country is crumbling, voter fraud is running rampant, unions are killing us, professors are brainwashing our kids and we must go to war with some country. The government knows your every move. We need to arm every able-bodied man with a gun and stop providing government help to freeloaders, except that doesn’t count when you are speaking of government subsidies to agricultural conglomerates, financial entities that are too big to fail and those who stash money in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands.
So now that you are convinced I’m a “pinko lefty” from the 1960s, let’s consider attitude.
Our attitude and what we show to the world should be the same. We can’t say we are 117 percent for veterans and then vote for politicians who do not work toward solutions to finding veterans housing, jobs and health care. Every politician who sports a little lapel flag pin and boasts about their respect for veterans should work and discuss, and discuss some more, with their colleagues about how to support veterans, and that’s not by putting up a statue of a veteran or naming a roadway after a fallen hero.
If your attitude is one that supports education, but you won’t consider funding education appropriately, or improving the school system, or blame the teachers and the unions for your child’s failure, and are the first one in line to sue a teacher who you felt was unfair to your little darling child, then your attitude and what you do are out of sync.
If your attitude is one that gives lip service to helping your neighbor, but you believe the majority of folks receiving food stamps are cheats and crooks, and they should pull themselves up by their bootstraps like all the successful folks in this country have done, just hope really hard that you don’t find yourself without bootstraps one day.
Seems like somewhere, at sometime in the past few decades, politicians started having a bad attitude toward what those who give them power want. Yet, simultaneously, these very same politicians used money and the media to promote this bad attitude in such a way that it stirs up support. All it took in the last election was a majority of a minority to be motivated enough to go out and vote. The bad attitude message was repeated often and was accepted.
Nothing stays the same forever. Attitude adjustment happens.
Rose Ann Miele is a journalist and was public information officer for Boulder City for nine years. She can be reached at roseannrab@hotmail.com or at 702-347-9924.