As I wonder about life I realize how rude and selfish people can be. All around us we hear loud, impolite car horns and people using profanity in every sentence. On the outer layer, the world seems like a great place.  But if you dig deeper, take some time from your day to truly look, you will find what I am about to talk about. Humanity is losing their respect. I believe that respect is the most vital thing that is preventing Earth from turning into a place where no one would want to be. We are turning into South Park if you think about it. I believe that respect is the most important attribute for someone to have.

One warm day in Hawaii, our church decided to go and sing for a retirement home. I always love to serve and I’m glad that I got the opportunity. After we sang to the large room full of elderly citizens, we walked around and shook all of their hands. What should have been a few minutes ended up one hour! Every retiree would want to share some of his or her wisdom with me. I tried really hard not to doze off while they blabbed about their life. I know some people in our school that would have been impolite and made some kind of excuse to get away from this snooze fest.          

  
Towards the end of the longest hour of my life, one elderly woman stood out from the rest. She was around 5 feet tall and smelled great of perfume. She had dark brown eyes and long gray hair. She talked to me about respect and how no one has it today. The talk she gave me was long so I will try to summarize it for the sake of the readers. She told me that respect was very common where she lived “back in the day”. Everyone used respectful words like madam or sir. She continued on to say that no one has respect anymore and that I needed to use respect in my everyday life. I remember her saying “Honey, I want you to make me a promise. I want you to respect everyone. I want you to respect your friends, your enemies, your peers, and your loved ones. No matter who they are, respect them.” After I said goodbye I pondered on her words. I have taken what she said and applied it to my life. I made her a promise to use respect everywhere I go. 

Another time during school, (6th period I think) we were given an assignment. The assignment was very important and counted for half of our grade that quarter. “If you goof off during this,” my teacher stated, “you will surely fail the quarter.” In other classes, students would have taken this assignment seriously. But because my teacher was actually a long-term sub, the other students thought that they did not need to pay attention. They thought the sub was stupid and ignorant. I remember how insanely loud and obnoxious the other students were while the sub was informing us on the assignment. There are two words to explain this, no respect. I felt like I was in a cage full of monkeys at the zoo.

My friend and I tried our best to tune out the student’s noise and got to work. After some time, we got the assignment done. With some time to spare, we got to have free time. By this time, some kids had not even started on this big assignment. Most were joking about the sub and calling him names. With my friend and I done with everything, we spent the rest of the time playing games on computers. Near the end of the period, the sub asked everyone to turn the big assignment in. Everyone in the room froze and quickly started to write on their paper. It was too late; the sub collected the assignments just before the bell rang. Fast forward to the next day around the same time as before. The substitute was disappointed at the class’ work. Being the nice sub he was, the whole class got the opportunity to redo the assignment. Some took it seriously and got right to work, but some still did not respect the sub and didn’t do the assignment for the second time.

The students who put off the assignment were very disrespectful. They got the chance to improve their grade but used it to gripe about how the sub was a nobody and couldn’t tell them what to do. When the sub got mad at them for not doing the assignment, the students back talked him. These misbehaved students clearly have no respect for others. Many other people around the world are like these students, Disrespectful and just plain rude. I should know because my I am a military brat and I move a lot. I see the same disrespect in every place I’ve lived. Pretend these students had actually followed directions and did the assignment. The sub would have been a lot happier and there would have been no conflict. If you haven’t seen already when you’re respectful, everyone gets along and everyone is happy. You may have impolite thoughts every once in a while, but don’t go and say it. It just created more hate than their needs to be.

One summer day, in a beautiful scout camp called Camp Pupukea, scout troop 4 and I had just begun to pitch our tents. After setting up our tents, we started on the trail that leads to the meeting center. I remember strolling on the dusty dirt path with my fellow scouts, breathing in the fresh forest air. When we got to the meeting center, we did a scout ceremony. We raised the flag, said a prayer, and sang a song or two. After the ceremony, the cheerful scoutmaster came up to the stand and told us that tonight would be the staff hunt. All of troop 4 jumped for joy. We were so excited because troop 4 has never lost a staff hunt. The scoutmaster went on to explain what happens in a staff hunt. Basically what happens is all of the camp’s staff hides throughout the camp. After the staff hide, the scouts go and try to find them. If you find a staff member hiding, you get tokens. The team with the most amount of tokens wins the staff hunt. The scoutmaster went on to say that if anyone got caught cheating would get disqualified. This statement killed the mood quicker than a bullet hitting its target. The truth is, troop 4 always cheats on the staff hunt. Usually, when the staff catches us cheating, they take away our tokens. But troop 4 usually has lots of tokens so it doesn’t dent our score too much.

The rules of the staff hunt are simple: don’t dress like leaders, always have headlamps turned on, and no bribing staff to give you tokens. Troop 4 broke all of the rules. We all looked like leaders, we turned off our headlamps, and we bribed a staff member into giving us some of his tokens. In the end, we had the most tokens and we had not gotten caught cheating. Troop 4 was thrilled and went back to our camp in the greatest mood possible. When I went to bed that night, I was thinking about how troop 4 cheated. I thought about how disrespectful we were to the camp staff. We disrespected the game and gave the other scout troops no chance of winning. If the other scout troops had found out we had cheated, they would have probably been mad at us. I did not feel like the person I wanted to be. In the long run, we found out another troop had snitched on us and we were disqualified from the staff hunt. The other troops were mad at us for cheating but forgave us nonetheless. I told myself I would not disrespect rules like this ever again  

So you see, we need to have respect, no excuse. Not just to be nice but to gain a good reputation. You want everyone to think of you as a good person. When I respect others, they seem to like me and give me their respect. Without respect, our society would crumble into dust. Everyone would be judging one another. I see this a lot in our community today. Do you want to be in a world like that? Everyone judging you and treating you like nothing?  Like that old lady at the retirement home said, “We are coming closer and closer to a place with no respect.” No respect equals no love, no true happiness, and most certainly, no place where I want to go. I have decided to keep that old, wise woman’s promise. The question is, will you also keep that promise?