Misery loves misery

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor

Yeah, I know that’s not how the saying goes, but I think this one is a little more applicable to today’s world. There are so many people who, it seems, are only “happy” when they are miserable — especially if they can make someone else miserable as well — and look for any reason to be mad or offended.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the TV show “Community.”

It’s been off the air for a while now, but it was a pretty big hit back in the day. In the show, there’s a character named Britta who is described at one point as being “pro-anti,” basically meaning she’s always down to protest, boycott, trash or otherwise rail against basically anything that others seem to be happy with, for no real reason, really. That describes so many people these days — determined to be mad about whatever it is there might be to be mad about…

See VIEWPOINT, page A9 VIEWPOINT

From page A4

It reminde me of this one time, when my boys were little. This was 20 or so years ago, back when we lived at our old house.

One of them had gotten a big old bucket of sidewalk chalk and the two of them went outside one day to play with it.

They were out there an hour or so, and I kept tabs on them through the front window We lived in a cove, so it was a pretty low-risk area for playing with sidewalk chalk, so they had a good time doodling whatever 7 and 9 year-olds doodle. Good times.

At one point, I looked out and saw an older neighbor lady (probably late 60s, early 70s) standing over them and saying something. I couldn’t hear anything but I assumed it was some little old lady platitudes about their artwork or maybe about how to draw a hopscotch grid. But no…

A short while later, I got a knock on the front door. It was her. She wanted to know if they were going to “clean up their mess.”

I kind of looked over her shoulder and saw them there, still drawing on the asphalt, thinking maybe they had snuck in for a snack or something and left trash in the street. Seeing none, I was confused and asked if maybe they had drawn something inappropriate. I wouldn’t think they would, but I also knew that 7 to 9 year-old boys are not above writing “FART” or whatever if given full creative license and a bucket of chalk.

No, she assured me. The chalk marks, she explained, looked “tacky” to her. I sttid there in silence, my head slightly cocked, long enough to get the point across that this whole conversation was stupid before finally saying, “It’ll wash off when it rains.”

I guess since I didn’t share her concerns about the tacky chalk vandalism, she left it at that and went back home. A little while later, the boys came back inside. I asked them what the lady had said to them. Neither of them could remember.

“We really weren’t listening to her,” my oldest admitted.

“Good,” I said.

Because really, when it comes to those kinds of people, if we all just ignored them, maybe they would just shut up and find something to be happy about for a change…

Like the old neighbor lady, who I am sure took great delight later that afternoon taking a garden hose to my boys’ creations and saving our neighborhood from urban decay.