Your insight presents a great opportunity for enhanced parenting which is much needed in our world. Please encourage research and production of programs to help those interested implement this teaching. How to manuals with practice scenarios for example. This goes way beyond just someone cutting in line.

Thank-you for choosing to be extraordinary,
David Pettengill

I totally disagree with Kerry Patterson that confrontation or name-calling = violence. People who cut in line DESERVE to be called bozos or worse. If others are too sheepish to follow my example of frankness and directness, that’s their problem — not mine.

Perhaps it is more EFFECTIVE to treat people with kid gloves (“You’ll catch more flies with honey than with vinegar”) but I’m just not inclined.

And who is to say that woman in Patterson’s example really did “push too hard” in opposing the policy change? So what if she called her opponents cretins? Maybe they ARE cretins. Doesn’t it depend almost entirely on what the policy change was and how it was going to affect the workers? She was painted as a hothead, but maybe she was the only one with balls enough to speak up.

It seems to me that Patterson’s message of “politeness” comes directly from the ruling class. It translates to “Know your place, prole.”

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As Owen thought of his child’s future there sprung up within him a feeling of hatred and fury against the majority of his fellow workmen.

They were the enemy. Those who not only quietly submitted like so many cattle to the existing state of things, but defended it, and opposed and ridiculed any suggestion to alter it.

They were the real oppressors — the men who spoke of themselves as “The likes of us,” who, having lived in poverty and degradation all their lives considered that what had been good enough for them was good enough for the children they had been the cause of bringing into existence.

He hated and despised them because they calmly saw their children condemned to hard labour and poverty for life, and deliberately refused to make any effort to secure for them better conditions than those they had themselves.

It was because they were indifferent to the fate of their children that he would be unable to secure a natural and human life for his. It was their apathy or active opposition that made it impossible to establish a better system of society under which those who did their fair share of the world’s work would be honoured and rewarded. Instead of helping to do this, they abased themselves, and grovelled before their oppressors, and compelled and taught their children to do the same. They were the people who were really responsible for the continuance of the present system.

http://www.globusz.com/ebooks/Ragged/