I recently turned 13, a big birthday; the entry to my teenage years had now begun. People told me that I now had to be more responsible, become organised, after all I was now in high school. All probably true but I have also become aware of other things, things around me that maybe have always been there but unseen to me.
I hear stories about people not being treated fairly and I don’t like it, people should be treated with equal amounts of respect and then maybe we would all get along. It should not matter if you were born here or migrated here from another country, this is home to me and anyone who choses to live here, so why is it so hard sometimes for all of us to live as one? I am only 13 but even I understand that we all live here under one set of laws and that is all I need to know, how come people so much older than me don’t understand that?
I recently read a true story about a cab driver who took an old lady from her house to a hostel, she was leaving her home for the last time, and he didn’t know this. He did not become impatient when he went to collect her and she wasn’t ready, he did not honk his horn twice to hurry her up, he merely knocked on her door and helped her to the car. He found out she did not have much time left to live and he drove her around the city revisiting her past, free of charge. When he dropped her at the hostel she thanked him for his kindness and he said, ‘I just treated you like I would treat my mother’ and as she went inside he realised that the closing of the door behind her was the closing of a life.
I would like to know why we can’t all do things like the cab driver, why I was so moved by his act of kindness and decency. Wouldn’t it be nice if things like that just happened instead of having to be brought to our attention? Doesn’t it feel strange that the bad things people don't shock you anymore? Yet kind things do. To me it feels very strange.
So what can we, or I as a young teenager do to change this? I imagine being aware of it is a start. Trying to more patient with people and remind myself that even people I may not really like have something good to offer. Maybe that old saying ‘treat people like you yourself would like to be treated’ is a fitting motto to live by. If we could all live by that simple statement then maybe we could live in perfect harmony, or close to it.
I don’t know if this matters to anybody else but it matters to me.
This article, by Reece Senior from Barrenjoey High School, was the Year 7/8 winner of What Matters? 2008.
What Matters? is a writing competition run by The Whitlam Institute that gives year 5-12 students in NSW and ACT a chance to say what matters in society today.
For more information go to: http://www.whitlam.org/whitlam/index.php
