I’m Sorry: 21st Century Style

The translation here, 21st century style, is, “I know I did something to inconvenience you, but I don’t really want to have an unpleasant exchange with you, and I certainly don’t want to change my behavior in any way, either, so I am saying this meaningless thing I learned in elementary school so you’ll go away and not say anything unpleasant to me to try to get me to actually take responsibility for my actions.”

Do I sound grumpy? Maybe I am.

But the translation is almost Hemingway-esque, in a way, isn’t it? I mean in terms of sentence structure.  Content and meaning be damned. Hemingway nor his characters would have said anything so insincere.  Imagine one of Papa’s characters making a false apology.  I mean, really.  They were more likely to leave a righteous apology unsaid than to make one insincerely.  But the compound sentences, Man! Look at the sentence structure!

But back to the issue, I am “apologized” to almost daily in this way.  I have occasion to run and ride my bike on a series of paved trails just miles from my house.  The trails are marked with a center stripe designed, I suppose, to keep everybody in line.  Still, I am constantly coming up behind pairs and groups of pedestrians and cyclists who have arranged themselves across the entire width of the trail, blocking it rather quite completely with their wide, wide, butts, their canine companions, their double-wide strollers, their colorful magnesium bicycles and associated festive costumery.  There is a plenitude of what-all out there, believe me.Being, as I am, a rather fit, aggressive young man of 57, I tend to overtake most of these people ‘ranged across the trail in front of me on a rather regular basis, so passing them becomes a necessity.  Almost always at these times, I hear from one or all of the people I have negotiated my way past (on the grass and mud beside the trail) the self-same utterance with which I began this essay–I’m sorry.

Invariably, upon looking back, I see them busily expanding their little duos, trios, and other-sized groups back across the width of the trail as I forge ahead on my way.  Obviously, they didn’t mean what they said–at least not in the old-fashioned way that I would mean it if I ever said it.  Of course, I arrange my life such that I have few occasions to ever need to apologize, but that’s another matter, and I run the risk of sounding unattractively sanctimonious if I continue along that route.

But I’m just asking, why didn’t they just say what they meant?  I mean, these people were going pretty slowly, so the reasonable assumption was that someone would overtake them. What was the plan, anyway?  Take up the trail, inconvenience people progressing at an “athletic pace,” and then make insincere apologies one after another over the course of the 30 or 40 minutes you’re going to be out? Where, exactly, is the fun in that?

As you see, there is lots of this I just don’t get, but that’s because I am a codger, mid-20th century style. I was raised back when adults didn’t think of their role as one that included bolstering children’s self-esteem and keeping them safe from feeling guilt.  In fact, I got the distinct impression that they viewed their role as quite the opposite, as if adults should be solely devoted to ruining my self-esteem and causing me to feel guilt deeply and regularly. One might get “too big for one’s britches” otherwise, and well, we just can’t have that sort of thing going on in our midst, now can we?

As a result of whatever shift that has occurred in parenting/teaching styles over the last few decades, almost everyone is too big for their britches now, so we hardly notice. Thus, they have no difficulty putting their own desires, whatever they may be, ahead of everyone else’s.  Those desires are, after all, far more important and worthwhile.

And my God, aren’t a lot of them too big for their britches in the actual sense of the word, too? Here, of course, I leave behind the “penguins”–my word for the young African-American gentlemen who, because their britches are far too big for anyone to be too big for them, walk around with their crotches down below their knees, their back pockets on their calves, and their lower legs splayed out to the sides to keep their pants from falling down completely.

Good show, 21st century teachers and parents. Our youth are feeling great about themselves.

But then, if these adults got the idea I had been offended, I’m sure they would say, “I’m sorry,” and we’d all feel a whole lot better about everything.

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