Corrupting the Youth

I used to feel bad walking down the streets of London. With so many people about, it is difficult not to step on someone's foot or cut someone off every once in a while. But having lived here for nearly two years, those feelings have long since subsided. You can only care about someone's aching toe for so long. I'll even run into somebody and barely utter a word. It isn't that I'm a bad guy (in my opinion) but when you are walking down Oxford Street and there are more than a million people within a half mile of you it is a struggle to get down the street in any sort of timely fashion.

I've perfected the art of gliding down an escalator on the Underground and then abruptly stopping right on the back of someone who is standing on the left when they should be standing on the right. You get uncomfortably close and then they move. No need to say anything, but sometimes a well timed cough is a must. A year ago, I would have lingered around a couple of steps behind forever waiting for Joe Pennyloafer to move his tourist ass out of the way. Not any longer. Being on the cusp of rude is not being rude, and it is a cusp on which the English balance very well.

But today I was walking out of the train station and waiting to cross the road. As I approached the crosswalk, I noticed that there was a young boy, maybe six, with his mother, already waiting there. No cars coming, so who has time to wait for the green walking man? I crossed, and when I did, the boy followed me. I could hear his mother yelling at him across the road and when I turned around, there he was, right by my side.

I try my best to not corrupt the youth. I try not to swear around kids, to not speak of bawdy subjects in their presence (on a train, for instance), and I am usually very conscientious of -- you guessed it -- crossing the road near kids. I don't want to be the guy teaching kids a bad lesson, and this bad habit is something they should learn from other friends or their parents later in life. I am convinced that there comes a time in a child's upbringing when waiting at the cross walk with no other cars approaching is just a waste of time. It might be at that moment that parents realise that they can't be perfect parents. From then on out, it is a slow decline from slight social disobedience to destructive social malevolence, from jay-walking to grand theft auto.