As we were heading to Birkhill cemetery to bury my brother a week past Wednesday, an older woman in a car on the Clement Park roundabout, cut in between the hearse and us in the mourner’s limousine.
Not satisfied with that lack of respect she then gesticulated angrily at our driver.
That was immediately followed by a male driver in a white BMW who also furiously shook his fist at us, angry that his way forward had been blocked by the two slow moving funeral cars.
In such shocking circumstances it was almost a dream like scenario; as though it was happening to someone else.
I was sitting in front with the limousine driver who told me that it wasn’t an isolated incident and they see this kind of behaviour often.
We have been heading down this path
When you’re about to say your final farewell to a man almost 13 years your senior, who took you to your first football matches, who taught you to question everything in life, and gave you your first lessons in politics, your mind is occupied with things other than replying to the astonishing lack of decency and respect shown by those two drivers, who were both long past their youth.
So in the midst of our sorrows I simply filed it quietly away in my mind and tried to put it behind me while we gathered to pay our final respects at the graveside.
The sad truth though is that once the wake was over and a degree of normality finally returned, after three weeks of dealing with undertakers, insurance companies, banks, and all the other elements involved in saying goodbye to a loved one, I realised that I actually wasn’t that surprised at the crass behaviour of those two furious drivers.
I sense we’ve been heading down this path for a long while where old commonly held notions of dignity, decency, and respect, have been slowly disappearing from our increasingly angry society.
We often talk about the idea of ‘mindless vandalism ’.
But there’s nothing mindless about the conduct of the two drivers who abused our funeral cortege.
Shared values are a thing of the past
They’re examples of a mindset which puts the idea of self above everyone and everything else.
Whether it’s driven by anger, frustration, or sheer badness is almost a moot point.
The real issue is that traditional ideas of commonly shared values of decorum and propriety are becoming things of the past.
When a funeral cortege passes by I still automatically stop and bow my head, it’s simply something that generations previously did as a mark of respect for a stranger on their way to their final resting place.
I simply cannot comprehend the mind of someone who would shout and rage and gesticulate at mourners in such a situation, because they were aggrieved that their journey had been delayed by literally five seconds.
And I certainly hope such folk never find themselves in a similar situation with a member of their own family.
I’m not sure how, or indeed whether, we can rekindle some of the elements of common decency and humanity which we appear to have misplaced in society.
When people lack the very basic tenets of civility, courtesy, and propriety, to be able to show simple respects to a passing funeral cortege without an explosion of rage, I’m not really sure there is any hope for such folk.
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