Values -- where are they?

[Guest guest]

http://youtu.be/q1CZ6INGCXsOne of my favorite Van on songs. It reminds me of someone I knew many years ago.Back in the late 60s I worked at a gas station here in Melbourne, doing the night shift, 7 pm to 7 am on the weekends. The gas station was part of a complex that included a car wash, where I worked whenever traffic was busy enough for them to hire me for the day.There was a young Greek guy who worked in the car wash some of the same days I worked. His name was Costas, and he was intellectually disabled, although back then people called him "slow."I don't remember how it came about, but Costas would come by the gas station on the nights I worked, to help me any way he could. Most often it was simply to announce, in a loud voice, "Shop!" when a customer pulled up at a pump and I was busy elsewhere. In recollection I think I was one of the few people who gave him the time of day, as though he were a regular human being.I do recall that I intensely disliked how some others treated him, like sending him to fetch a "left-handed spanner," which he would dutifully set about to do. It was mindless mean-spiritedness, and not worthy of the perpetrators for the most part.Costas might have been "slow," but he didn't have a mean bone in his body, or a mean thought in his mind. Sometimes his pronouncement of "Shop!" annoyed me, but never enough for me to be mean to him.I'm trying to work out what my values are. Maybe empathizing with so-called underdogs is one of them.Regards,Detlef