Remember when people used to be nice to each other?

:grouphug: that's all i got

 

When I first moved into this neighborhood, I invited everyone to an open house party. Most of them showed up and everyone seemed to have a good time, but it didn't lead to anything. One person did ask me a year later if I was going to have another party. I guess they will accept any amount of free food and drinks, as long as they don't have to do anything in return.

That's all that anyone can reasonably expect of you.

 

Now that I think about it pretty much everyone I know is really nice. Maybe I just need to get out more.

 

ok i'm gonna add my worthless opinion haha.

it seems to me that we may be misunderstanding what the term "unconditional love" means.

i always understood it to mean loving someone and not expecting anything in return. as in not having "conditions" like some business deal. you love them because you care for them and want to see them happy and safe.

i never figured unconditional love to mean you love someone no matter what kind of shitty things they do to you.

nothing is ever black and white anyway.

obviously you may want to reconsider a friendship with someone who's stealing from you. but do you keep helping out friends and being polite to strangers even if they don't seem to appreciate it?

yes.

why? because as soon as you stop, you become one of those people you want to not be nice to or love. then before you know it everyone in the world is an ass hole.

so wouldn't you say it's a good thing that there are people who are nice even if not everyone is nice to them?

what ever happened to treating people who you wanna be treated? turning the other cheek? loving your neighbor?

i'm not trying to be preachy. but you dont have to be a real religious person to know its only decent to be nice to people, even if they treat you wrong sometimes.

 

No, you don't have to be religious, you just have be terribly short sighted...

You want to try to make this a relgious thing... Do onto others as you would have them do onto you... so the Godly thing to do, would be for you to treat those who mistreat you, the same way they treat you.

Yeah, I see no problem with that... but of course, I am not even close to a religious person....

 

i'm not making anything religious.

god doesn't have anything to do with just being nice to people.

if one of you're friends does something to piss you off are you not going to ever talk to them again?

if someone says something rude to you doesn't it feel the least bit satisfying to know you were nice to them anyway and weren't an ass hole back to them?

some of us don't like being thought of as jerks. that was the original purpose of the thread- people being nice because they are conscious of how others think of them.

that doesn't mean you bend over backwards to please judgmental people, but it's still a nice feeling knowing you're liked isn't it?

 

If a friend did something to piss me off, then chances are, I am not going to talk to them... why? becuase my friends dont do things that piss me off, seems the things that piss me off are related to betrayal of trust and abuse.

Now, if you were the type of person that got pissed off if someone wore the wrong color on a certain day, then I could understand being leery to use that as a marker...

As for that part... being like for who I am, yes... being liked because I am nice to people who don't deserve it... no. That would make me feel slimy and I would need to take multiple showers daily.

 

haha i don't care what my friends wear. i just meant that people, even best friends, get into it sometimes. people have bad days, say things they don't mean. that kinda stuff.

spouses do it all the time and yet they still love each other.

you never know which person you see in the store who does something you think is rude may just be having a bad day. is that an excuse for them to be a jerk to someone? not necessarily. but it also means that sometimes we should consider what makes people act a certain way sometimes.

i think that was the point someone was trying to make. just because someone may do something to you that you don't like doesn't also mean that they don't ever deserve for you to be nice to them.

 

Tom - In response to your response to my response:

I get what you mean, and I agree. When friends literally betray you, it's a completely different story. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

I honestly wasn't considering theft or any kind of personal attack in my statement. I posted in the context of "why aren't we nice to our neighbors, co-workers, and peers anymore?" Not "why aren't we nice to those who are out to get us?"

Your post stands true - and I definitely did not mean that I will not ever give somebody the "brush-off". I would just never do so to a person that has done me no harm.

 

A good idea, even for those of us who are not at all religious. It just works. Practicing this doesn't make you a Christian any more than using wise, useful insights from Buddha makes you a Buddhist. (I do that too.)

Going to church regularly doesn't make you a Christian either. I have old friends who play the church game strictly for social reasons. It works for them, and some of the charity fundraising projects that they work on are worthwhile, which helps them feel like they are doing an okay thing. I just can't play that game because I don't want new friends bad enough to be a total fraud. I'd rather stick with my college friends, who all live more than an hour away, who accept me as I am. I guess that's going to have to be enough for me.

 

My great uncle who is 88 was telling me about back in his day, how people would help other people out and not want anything in return. Someone sees you working on your roof and they come over to see if you need a hand. I would have loved to lived in that time

 

i remember that. and you could walk away from your house and leave the door open and no one would mess with anything. of course living in a small town where everyone knew they'd have to see each other again the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that, may have had something to do with it too.

but also people weren't raised to worship the dollar. at least most of us weren't. there was prejudice against marxism of course, but people didn't try to call it that when you didn't try to make everything have to begin and end with money.

there was also, building codes were only in the city, to keep people from getting burned up in cheap apartment buildings. if you lived out in the boonies you could pretty much build and live in whatever you damd well saw fit to dream up with your own mind and build with your own hands. and a lot of people did.

the only parking spaces schools had were for teachers and the bus.

most people's parents hadn't completed high school, and very few had ever been to college.

and you could ride in the back of a pickup truck. people did that all the time. seat belts didn't exist, except on air planes, which most people had never ridden on. but you didn't have to drive either. there was always some kind of train or bus to just almost anywhere. and people didn't think there was anything wrong with you if you were walking either.



and if you were walking along the road, people would stop and offer rides, and i mean without thumbing and not because you looked like something they might have wanted to go to bed with either.

and if they hugged their kids, they didn't have to worry about some fanatic accusing them of sexual abuse either.

and if you lived far enough from school to have to ride the bus, the school owned the bus and it was free, but if you missed it you had to walk, or miss the day and get in trouble for doing so.

 

In my neighborhood everybody is fairly nice +exept this little teenagers who run the streets all damn day and night

 

once upon a time, a long long time ago, when liberals still wanted to liberate everyone, and conservatives still gave a dam about conserving anything, there was this then so familiar concept it was taken for granted, that has become almost nearly forgotten. it was called consideration. it was the recognition that how we treated each other, directly affected nearly every aspect of the world we had to live in. that day, and the next day and the day after that.

i have a good idea why and how it became forgotten, and i'm not going to raise my blood pressure at the moment detailing the procedure.

i only mention that i suspect, just suspect, that a day will come, when survival of the human species, will require its rediscovery.

 

Depends on the place- I know places in Switzerland where almost everybody in the streets says hello to you with a friendly smile, in other places in Germany people ignore you, many look at you as if they would like to kill you...

 

when and where i grew up, through my then eyes as a young child (60+ years ago) america had more of a live and let live culture based more on being considerate of each other. i think that's a lot more important, valuable, and beneficial, then asking each other the often unanswerable "how are you feeling" and forcing ourselves to try to pretend to care more then you actually do.

what i DO care about is the kind of world we all have to live in, and THAT has a lot more to do with how well or otherwise anyone actually feels, then smiles and pretensions. (although hugs of course, ARE (almost) always good.)

(i don't know about anyone else, but every time i think of something that might be an absolute, i can almost always think of exceptions, and usually do.)

 

People are people and nothing has changes throughout time. People are nice and people are a-holes. People can't learn from their mistakes and therfore we are destin to repeat our mistakes. I respect all I see. I don't get the same in return. I go on with life and smile all the way. I am mindfull of those wishing to take advantage or hurt me and mine. When I am put in that situation than ther is hell to pay. I will not crap for anyone or anything.

 

I still do this sort of thing when I have free time and so does my neighbour but I can see how unusual this is when I help someone out and they give me strange looks and seem stunned at the same time. One time I was helping my landlady who came by to move a gigantic pile of crushed rocks and I couldn't believe how she thought it was odd that I rushed out to help her and that my neighbours (aside from the nice one) would just come home stare at us then go inside and watch TV and drink a beer, occassionally coming out to watch us while smoking a cigarette. It took about 8 hours with 4 of us (my girlfriend helped too). I couldn't have imagined her doing it herself, it would have taken weeks.

Whenever I help someone out I never regret it but everytime someone doesn't help another out I'm sure there's a moment of regret, there is for me even if I really couldn't spare the time.

 

I bet in 20 years we will be looking back at 2011 and saying "remember back then when people were nice". Memory tends to recall the good stuff.

 

What world you live in everybody try to get over on each other