As I was driving on my way to work on a Sunday, about a week ago, I turned onto a street that ran past a housing project, that I will not name. 

I was going about 40 miles per hour and in my SUV which has a somewhat menacing black grill. 

It apparently was not scary enough for a group of older teenagers, who decided to
walk out across traffic, against the light, in the middle of the block, and slowly shuffle in
front of me. 

They looked away as if they were somehow blessed with the ability to deflect or elude a few thousand pounds of steel with no problem.A

I had more than enough room so I slowed down, but not to a point of complete submission to their stupidity.  When they realized that this time they might actually pay a price for not being the sharpest knives in the drawer, several of them scooted across and picked up their feet.  

But one boy, who I could only describe as a walking lobotomy, stepped back and threw his soda bottle at my window, angry apparently because he wasn’t given free reign to exercise his God- given right to be a complete jackass and maybe additionally angry because his common sense got the better of him and made his instincts do what was right and yield.

Why in this modern age of limited but technologically advanced space travel, high speed and seamless commutations — in a place where virtually every illness now has a pill for you to take for it — is there still no cure for ignorance and no way to clearly get across that certain kinds of behavior are just unacceptable?

People cut in lines, talk in the movies, weave and bob in traffic that’s going nowhere, and everyone else has to just get out of the way. 

Most of these people, regardless of what they may think, are generally not the strong, intelligent souls they believe themselves to be, but rather tend to be dregs.  

They blame everyone else for their problems, there is some large conspiracy that has targeted them, or they think the world owes them something. 

They confuse anger and selfishness with strength, they confuse loudness with intelligence, and they confuse verbal humiliation with wit.

It’s one thing to see those tendencies in an adult who has had their chance to figure it out, but to see them in young people, so coldly cast in the bedrock of their personalities at an early age, is like seeing someone’s future and knowing that person will have a hard life. 

Hard because, no matter what your education, ethnicity, or economic base, you have to get along with people. 

You have to know that a person doesn’t exist in a vacuum and that moving through life like you are the only person in it will ultimately lead to a collision.  Like the one that almost took place with these wannabe thugs and me on a Sunday afternoon.

I had this horrible thought after that stupid kid hit my car. I looked in the rear view mirror and thought: “I’d get out and deal with you, but if you’re that stupid, you’re already dead and you’re too dumb to know it.” 

As my anger cooled I thought about the reality of how true that might be.  I thought about the unlikelyhood of this kid seeing his 21st birthday because he refuses obey the simple rules the rest of us generally agree to follow, and my rage softened to sadness.

We only have ourselves to blame. The “no parameters” generation learned everything they know from us. 

We don’t get a pass to say its TV or the music or the schools. Most of us came up during a time when we could see the shift of standards in society and decided which side we would choose – not only for ourselves but also for our kids.  

Many of us chose unwisely.  I don’t buy the excuse that circumstances dictate how people will end up.  

If someone is a nasty person, they didn’t learn it in a vacuum.  Someone taught them directly or indirectly how to be an infectious member of society.

My long-suffering notions of excuse- making are running thin amidst all the negative behavior in our community, some of which seems to be re-emerging in the crime statistics.  

I can’t really tell you what I think should be done with many of the people, young and old, who can’t follow some very simple rules of courtesy among us, for fear I would be labeled some kind of radical.

I once heard a phrase I agree with, even though I know it is neither very practical nor likely in the real world.

It is: “Stupid should hurt”. 

If that could only be restricted to the owner of the adjective, what a wonderful world it would be.

— Gary Anthony Ramsay is a weekend anchor
and journalist on the all-news
cable station NY1 and along-time resident of Queens.