A101 Team Could the biggest problem in our country today be the growing “respect deficit”? Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution argues that we need to address the lack of respect with which Americans treat each other.
He opens his argument with a chilling anecdote about the treatment of bus drivers in the Washington, D.C. area. Specifically, he mentions “a sharp increase in the number of drivers subjected to verbal and physical abuse in 2017. Drivers were punched, spat on, and screamed at. In one case, a woman threw a cup of her own urine (collected during the journey) at a driver. Employee injuries rose by around 50 per cent in the summer of 2017, compared with the previous year.”
But he goes further than merely diagnosing the problem:
If respect is the key to relational equality, the question is what generates it? What makes me respect you, or respect myself, or earn your respect? And how can it be restored? The clearest one-word answer to all of these questions is this: work.
The dignity and independence associated with work contrasts both with idle aristocracy and with the subjection of slavery. Work provides structure, purpose and identity – and by extension, community and inclusion. …
We need to reduce growing economic gaps, and especially the physical segregation of social classes. But our deeper challenge is to restore respect, especially for those who are very different to us, or who have very different views to us. Disagreement is one thing; disrespect is quite another. If we want a better society, we need to restore some of the respect that has been lost. This is a task for each one of us, in the thick of our everyday life.
Read the full article at Aeon.
