This beautiful exchange

“No one cares about a wedding except for the bride, and no one cares about a kid, unless it’s theirs.”

I read this statement over the weekend. It’s from a comment left on another blog. The author of the blog writes about her life, including her husband, dog and baby. (Like me but not me.) This particular reader felt the need to let the author know that he was bored with her blog by leaving this comment. Of course, I would think that if you didn’t like what you were reading on a blog, stop reading it. There are a bazillion other blogs on the internet. Why leave a nasty comment on one because you don’t like reading about husbands and babies? Move on, already.

But, even more than leaving the comment, I don’t understand why this attitude is becoming so prevalent. In my opinion, marriage and children are benchmarks in our society. Why can’t people just be truly happy for the bride and groom? Why do we look at what other people have and only think about what we don’t have? Are we really too selfish to allow ourselves to share in someone else’s joy and rejoice with them?

And, when did children become a nuisance? When did our lives, our money, our peace and quiet become more important than the young minds and hearts around us? It may not be our kid, but they are still important and deserve to be treated with respect. “Let the little children come to me.” Why are the people who don’t have children the biggest judges of those who do and how they “manage” their kids? I think most are just judging something they know nothing about.
In my opinion, comments and attitudes like this only reveal how selfish we have become as a society. We’ve become so self-centered that we no longer value other people or their perspectives, especially if their life is different than our own. To me, that’s the bottom line, the real issue. That’s what really concerns me. We are different and have different lives, but no one is more valuable than the other.
Attitudes like the one displayed in the above comment really get under my skin. I can’t begin to tell you how irritated it makes me. I do not want to be that kind of person and I wish that I didn’t live in that kind of society.