I pulled into the parking lot at work the other day. Temperatures were in the single digits. Since I've been there for over 10 years, I get a "Preferred" parking spot in a select area. Which means that I don't have to walk as far as less tenured employees do. There are well over 1,000 people who work where I do, and there really aren't enough Preferred spots for all of us longer-termers. You need to know all of this to understand how piggish it is for someone to take up three spaces in a premium area. That's right, this Bozo parked so that he was taking up three spaces.

So, what does it take for a person to be this oblivious or this selfish or this mean-spirited to ace two other people out of a closer parking spot on a frigid day, when even a few extra yards through the ice and snow can be minor torture?

I've also noticed that there is not a lot courtesy on the road. Few people wave anymore when you let them in. People speed up on the freeway to cut you off. And, even though you KNOW they know that lane ends after the light, they still try to speed up and cut everyone off getting over to the left lane.

Are the times a changin' or are people really ruder than they ever have been? I guess you can look at the Bible and say, with all of the stuff that went on, human nature hasn't changed much.  But I also believe we hide behind our cars and our electronic devices.

People feel safe and anonymous in their cars. They can drive like a-holes, no one knows who they are, so they can get away with it. They can be rude over the phone, because they're not making human contact, they're talking to a machine, which doesn't have feelings or a life. This de-personalization makes it easy for us to be lousy human beings, because somehow, we're not dealing with other human beings, we're dealing with machines. So if I call and yell at some Customer Service rep about my cable being out, I'm just venting to the wall. She doesn't have a family at home. She isn't sitting there wishing she'd finished her college degree instead of dropping out. She doesn't want to scream back that if she could make the GD cable work she would, but it's not her fault that a squirrel got fried in the transformer.

We seem to lose sight of our common humanity. We all really want the same basic things. A home that's warm and loving, a good life for our kids, food enough to fill us, good health, good friends, a decent job. Safety. Comfort. Financial security.

The irony, of course, is that we've created "social media," so we can keep in touch with one another. And yes, Facebook can be a wonderful thing. It can also be a terrible thing, because, again, people type things they would never say to someone in person. And, as good as it is, you can't reach out on Facebook and give someone a hug. You can only "poke" them.