Where is society headed?

I just want to share my story, because I think it is already very depressing and scary, in fact, at where our society's mentality is headed.

I was driving my daughter to her father's house to pick something up on a recent weekday morning. It was about 9am, and we had just had a huge snowfall, so the roads were nasty. On her father's street, at the stop sign adjoining it to the bigger cross street, sat a huge truck with a trailer carrying 2 snowmobiles. As I passed it on the way to her dad's house, I could see the driver happily having a conversation with someone.

About 7 or 8 minutes later, when we were leaving, we pulled up behind the same truck/trailer which was still stopped, still running, no flashers, no signal, not even remotely pulled to the side of the road, and not even the courtesy of a hand wave to say "please just go around me."

So I pulled around, in the extremely slippery roads (which are not flat where he lives), hoping to God that nobody was coming the other way, to make a right hand turn back to the main road. As we passed the driver, he looked at us with an arrogant, dirty look as if to say "what the hell are you looking at? I can park where I damn well please!"

I caught it all on dashcam. So, since I belong to a Facebook group called "Shaming bad drivers of the Okanagan", I decided to post it, as this was clearly not a driver in any kind of trouble, and was clearly doing something incredibly stupid and dangerous!

What disturbed me most were the comments. I hope after reading my letter, people will go and watch it themselves, and see the comments. Apparently, while the truck driver may be in the wrong, I'm the bad driver because I believe a huge ass truck and trailer, parked, running, at a stop sign, completely impeding traffic, in a snow storm, is wrong. And even though I saw that the driver was not in any trouble whatsoever, saw him there for almost 10 minutes, and never once used my horn, said anything to him, or used any hand gestures whatsoever, I am the "impatient" one.

I want to know why every year, people are taking less and less responsibility for their poor choices and actions? It's glaringly obvious in the youth of today, and where is that going to get them? My own kids, who are 17 and 21, see it before their eyes and are not very positive about where their future society is heading.

Thirty years ago, do you think we would see people flat out refusing to wear a cloth mask for 10-20 minutes while they shop for groceries? Absolutely not, because common sense prevailed, and community regard was actually a thing. This is the reason I am an introvert nowadays.

Michelle Pothier, West Kelowna