On Consideration (30 June 2003)

When I was sixteen, I had the opportunity to spend two years at the Lester B. Pearson United World College of the Pacific. These were revolutionary years for me. The college was founded on principles of internationalism, something about which we learn very little in this country as a rule, and it had lofty ideals: its ultimate goal, as part of the United World College Movement, was to promote world peace. It did this by offering scholarships to students from all over the world, seeking especially to include young people from countries who were enemies, and making them live together for eighteen months of their lives. The idea, put very simply, was that if you live with someone long enough, and get to understand them, their situation, their lives, you will be less likely to want to blow them off the face of the earth.

Now I must confess. I was impressed by all the lofty idealism, and the experience of sharing my life with people from every continent of the globe was unique. But it was not this that changed me so fundamentally.

You see, when I was sixteen I was sent to a school that had no rules.

Well, I shouldn't put it quite like that. The Pearson College that shaped me had, in fact, three rules. It was made very clear to us, however, that two of them were rules that had been imposed on the college from without, and they existed because they had to. The first of these was no drugs; drugs were against the law in British Columbia and in Canada, and breaking this law resulted in immediate expulsion. The second was no getting pregnant. The majority of the students were on international visas, and the complications to be faced by a non-Canadian student giving birth to a Canadian child were nightmarish.

It was the third "rule", though, that changed my life forever. It was this. Everything we did, every action we took at the college, was to be governed by consideration for other people. Before you judge someone else, we were told, before you take an action that will affect another person, walk around in his moccasins for a while.

Now it would seem as though this is a mighty silly rule. From a certain perspective, it's not really a rule at all. There are punishments for breaking rules; and how can one punish someone for not acting out of consideration for other people? How can one even know what the motive for an action is? And it's an especially silly rule to expect to govern two hundred teenagers away from home for the first time. I must admit, by the end of my stay there, I was completely fed up with "consideration" and all the difference that it didn't make to people's behaviour. But I couldn't know just how profound would be the effect of that rule on the rest of my life.

You see, when you're asked to govern your behaviour according to how it will affect other people, you learn something far more valuable than the ability to abide by rules; you learn how to take responsibility for your actions, to consider the effect of your life on the lives of those people around you.

I've been thinking a lot about the principle of consideration in recent months.

I think about it when I'm teaching, and people come late to class. Being good Bahamians, these students never fail to announce their arrival with a cheery greeting to all and sundry; after all, they've been well brought up, and one should never enter a room without acknowledging the other people in it. That they are also interrupting the lesson in progress seems not to cross their minds. No one, apparently, has taught them that it might be nice to enter the room before the scheduled activity has started, so that you can greet the people without simultaneously disturbing the class. I think about it when I've paid good money to attend a movie or a play. Invariably there are latecomers, and they invariably have to step over others to get to their seats, disturbing the people around them, blocking others' views, or, in the worst cases, interrupting what's taking place on the stage or the screen. I think about it when these students or patrons leave their cell phones on the loudest and catchiest ring possible, and when they see fit not to turn the phone off when it does ring, but to answer it and interrupt affairs still more. And I think about it when I've done my best to get to an event on time, only to have to wait for several chunks of hours for it to begin. (Oddly enough, that never seems to happen in church; Bahamians always seem to arrive early when God is involved, and church services almost always start on time.)

I think a lot about it when I'm on the road — when, for example, I'm driving along, and someone pulls out into traffic just in front of me, and proceeds to cruise along at fifteen miles an hour, forcing me to slam on my brakes to avoid an encounter that's closer than I'd like. I think about it when the jitney right in front of me stops a good four feet from the curb, proceeds to let two people off and take another on, travels ten more feet, and stops again; I think about it when the man in the truck four cars ahead slows down to shout some urgent message to his cousin on the other side of the road, and the two of them catch up for fifteen minutes, while the cars pile up behind them. I think about it a lot at those four-way stops or those blinking streetlights that you come across at unexpected intersections, especially when the cars coming along the cross-road are bigger or older or scruffier than mine.

And I think about it when I hear people talking blithely about What To Do With Haitians and Other Immigrants. These solutions almost always involve Sending Them Back to Their Own Country, or Razing Their Homes To The Ground, or Locking Them Up for Breaking the Laws of Our Land. Rarely, if ever, do solutions take into account the disparities in wealth between our countries, or suggest that we Bahamians, some of the richest people in the region, might consider freely sharing our blessings.

When I left Pearson College, I was completely fed up with the idea of consideration. It just didn't work, I thought. People need to have rules. They don't really care about others and their feelings, and it's futile to expect them to. If you don't have rules against it, they will dirty all the cups in the dayroom and leave messes for other people to clean up. They will throw their bright red clothing into the washing machines with your whites, and they will put your priceless sweater in the dryer and never think twice about it. Worse, they'll probably laugh at you if you complain about it.

But I was wrong.

The thing about trying to live your life according to the principle of consideration is this: rules don't change people. They merely give them parameters within which to act, and teach them how to get around them. They don't provide individuals with any sense of personal responsibility, and they do very little to make the world a better place for everyone, not just a few.

So I think I'm going to look around me this week. I'm going to take up someone else's moccasins, walk around a little bit. And then I'm going to see what effect that has on the way I act after that.