What's With Society and Ethics?

I could easily write for hours and hours on this the subject that is the most intriguing to me, but I'll spare the boredom and write just about my run in with ethics at 3 different points in the day today:

The first run in was at work where this morning while waiting around for our daily stretch and flex routine, one of my coworkers was retelling his story of the weekend and was saying how he got with this chick while he was out over the weekend.  Now this wouldn't be so bad, but my man has a child with his girlfriend!  I know what people do with their own life is none of my business, but what irks me is this lack of ethics to think about someone other than themselves.  Yes I could be asking myself how much of this story is actually true (because I know I for sure am gullible) but honestly, how can someone in their right mind put their relationship with their daughter in jeopardy?  Am I really that much of an old school thinker to see this as wrong?  It just bothers me that there are so so many people out there whether in relationships for years and have children in those relationships, or single, that jump from partner to partner or are unfaithful to their partners.  Why must we humans always think about ourselves as number 1?  Ethically speaking shouldn't we be looking in the mirror and saying "How would I feel if I was on the receiving end of this news?" "If I was the one finding out that my partner did something with someone else" instead of thinking "Oh it's ok this one time won't hurt," or if they do find out "What's the worst that could happen? I lose my daughter because my ex takes her away from me, oh wait that won't happen though because she won't find out."  These are just some of the things passing through my mind as I hear story after story like this of guys or girls cheating on their significant other with someone else because they think oh they will never find out.  Let's stop and think how would I feel if I got news like this instead of thinking about what I want all the time.  

That's run in number 1. 


The second run with ethics today was at Dunkin Donuts in Mt. Kisco while at work today.  I had just gotten my order and was walking out the door back to my truck when I see this older couple heading towards the door of Dunkin Donuts so I hold the door open for them.  As they walk towards the door seeing it being held open, they let out a big "Thank you" and in what I saw and heard was a very surprised tone.  Their reaction to me holding the door took me by quite surprise as I realized has it really become such a big deal to hold the door for people? Again ethics.  Has it really been washed away from the teachings of parents today to teach respect to your elders or to teach respect for guys to girls and hold doors open for them?  Again it goes way back to my old school ways and I mean this could all stem from being raised in Catholic school until going to Cornell University for college, but RESPECT is something that does mean so much to me.  It is something that is long gone from the everyday lives of the people who live around us.  I hope to seriously touch on this in a future post, but for now, next time you gentlemen or ladies for that matter walk through a door and there is someone behind you or in front of you, please hold the door open for them because you never know when you may not be able to grab the door for yourself that one day.  

My second run. 

My final run with ethics today was here at my house.  My neighbor (who is also my really good friend) just had his driveway paved by a paving company whom I had never seen before in my life.  I figured nothing of it, but then when I went to cut my other neighbor's grass I smelled diesel fumes coming from somewhere.  I looked down the catch basin in front of my neighbor's house and what do I come upon but a sheen of diesel in the water below.  Immediately it strikes a chord within me as one of the things that eats at me the extreme most is pollution to waterways.  In junior year of college I did a project on storm water remediation more specifically about Jamaica Bay watershed here in Queens and Brooklyn that sits adjacent to JFK Airport.  Needless to say, that class changed my life forever, I learned more in that one semester that has paid off for me in the long run than the first four semesters of school previously had.  Again I hope to touch on storm water and green issues in future posts, but in regards to today, these two catch basins where the diesel was dumped into drain out to a stream which eventually drains out to the Long Island Sound.  So I continued to cut my neighbor's grass but as I was going about it, the fumes of the off-gassing diesel kept getting stronger and stronger.  Finally it got to me and I called the Dept. of Environmental Conservation at two different numbers and got no response, so then I said let me call the City's Water Dept.  Well that triggered a great response, the cavalry came storming in.  First the police showed up, then the water dept sent a truck out and finally the fire dept showed up.  When all was said and done the fire dept deemed the diesel to not be of a great risk and diluted it and flushed it down the drain with large amounts of water.  Ethics again, where was this contractor's ethics? Today we as a society, nation, world are in a much greater environmental conundrum than we have ever been before due to our increase in reliance on some natural resources (all the environmental activism stuff aside I do believe that we need to work on being green as it will help us in the long run) so doing stuff like dumping diesel down a drain that leads to the ocean is a bit uncalled for.  Yes there are millions upon millions upon millions of gallons of water in the ocean and that diesel would have been cleaned out in no time, but think of the little pieces along the way that don't have those millions of gallons of water to clean out the contaminant.  These catch basins drain to a stream that at points is no wider than a foot and deeper than 8 or so inches, so that area would become inundated with diesel when the diesel finally moved out.  I hope that these contractors even if they don't get any fines or anything from this learned a lesson from today.  Will it all make sense to them? I doubt it and will they have learned from it again I doubt it, but hopefully I opened up the responding departments eyes to these malpractices that go on each day that get overlooked and hopefully they will make a change to see that something like this doesn't happen again. 

Alright enough on ethics.  Sorry to bore you to death but there is something to be said with the misdirection that is occurring in so many areas today.