Who is an adult? To keep it simple, an adult is an individual who has crossed adolescence, is able to think for himself, thus a wiser person in terms of maturity. Officially, you become one when you turn 18, after which you are more responsible for your actions. Now, who is the stubborn adult?
To begin with, all through childhood and adolescence, we have been fed with countless lessons on etiquettes and life skills, Dos and Don’ts, etc. Growing up we learnt math, science, social sciences, literature and the list goes on. It’s true that while not all of us aced all the subjects, we surely grasped the basics of calculations; learnt about the cosmos; why the apple fell off the tree for Newton to come up with gravity; a little bit of history_ minus the dates; and also the dreaded global warming: something everyone knows about yet only few ever took it seriously. We are perfectly aware of the environmental issues starting from pollution, yet all those expensive years of education still isn’t measuring up to knock some civic sense in us. And that is how the stubborn adult comes into being.
The stubborn adult is just like any other regular person, but suffers from acute stubbornness with symptoms of civic sense deficiency yet refuses to get well. Also, this condition is highly common among the educated lot because textbooks have been screaming at us all these years about the dangers of pollution which is a by-product of blatant littering of waste everywhere (even if it’s just an innocent plastic sweet wrapper) eventually causing environmental degradation which only speeds up global warming, and yet somehow, the stubborn adult dodges these warnings every single time. At the end of the day, it comes down to one’s civic sense because everyone grew up learning the need to practice good habits of cleaning the surroundings yet only few take these lessons outside of the home, while the remaining majority are too stubborn to practice them. Young children can be cured of silly stubborn behaviour under adult supervision but who is going to cure the stubborn adult?
Massive portions of land are strewn with untreated plastic waste which only grows like cancer, yet our brains are imperceptive to the mess our eyes clearly see. Our land is getting sicker by the day as humans grow more callous as the stubbornness progresses and we seem to have no qualms about living in the era of plastics. It gets worse during the festive seasons and any other major event, leading to the question: why does merry-making and leisure have to come at the cost of hurting Mother Nature? In this context, children grow up to become stubborn adults because they are used to seeing other adults littering anywhere and everywhere that isn’t their home. A major symptom of acute civic sense deficiency is that somehow our limbs become very stiff as though bound by chains whenever we spot a plastic bottle or wrapper lying on the ground in cold blood, which obviously doesn’t make sense medically, yet is quite prevalent. So who is sicker? Is it the eco system that has been invaded by cancerous plastics and other pollutants or the stubborn individual whose senses are impervious to cleanliness etiquette?
You might think it’s okay to give in to the temptation of throwing that wrapper on the street but there could be ten thousand other stubborn adults in your locality doing the same thing at the same time, repeating the act everyday for the rest of their lives. Surely, it would be a shame to let all that expensive education create a cheap person.
Here is a reminder: civic sense isn’t expensive nor does the individual require trips to the doctor; every other stubborn adult can get well soon with a daily dose of cleanliness etiquette.
