I got to thinking one day about respect, and how often I hear "respect has to be earned". I don't know when earning respect became a thing, but that saying has always bothered me. When I was little I was still taught to respect other people, because it's the right thing to do. I still tend to respect people until they give me a reason not to.
This then got me to thinking about how this attitude affects our entire society.
If respect has to be earned, logic dictates that people aren't worthy of respect simply by virtue of being fellow humans. This is where everything starts to fall apart. This is why we don't take care of our own in this country; why we don't have universal health care, why we have such a paltry minimum wage, and on and on and on. People are so busy wallowing in their own self-importance.
Just look at how some people treat servers, cashiers and other service employees just because they happen to have some low-income job. They wouldn't know them from Adam or Eve, but see them only as "unskilled" (I hate that word by the way) and lazy, not as ordinary people just trying to make a living in this shitty economy, never mind that they could be veterans, or someone with a graduate degree or whose middle-class factory job got shipped overseas and the minimum wage job is all they could find.
I would argue that trust has to be earned. Both trust and respect can be lost in an instant though, and both can take a long time to regain once lost.
People who say respect is earned usually have no interest in earning other people's respect and are the most entitled. They don't respect people who are different from them, and they will never give them a chance to earn their respect. They're also the ones who scream the loudest about tolerance when they are called out; no, we shouldn't tolerate racism, homophobia, misogyny, or any other shitty behavior.
I read something on Tumblr that puts it much better than I ever could:
stimmyabby:
Sometimes people use “respect” to mean “treating someone like a person” and sometimes they use “respect” to mean “treating someone like an authority”
and sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say “if you won’t respect me I won’t respect you” and they mean “if you won’t treat me like an authority I won’t treat you like a person”
and they think they’re being fair but they aren’t, and it’s not okay.
I'm just so angry and depressed at what's been happening in this country, although I can see the pendulum slowly starting to swing the other way again. Thanks to the SCOTUS, for the first time in a long time America seems a little less crappy this week.
