"SHE DIS’ED ME!"

I was at a workshop where the facilitator asked what the meaning of “dis’ed” is. I looked around and saw faces that described how unfairly treated the elderly feels in the neology world of generation X. I was probably the youngest in the audience and had the honour of defining the word whose origin is traced to American prisoners (when asked why they committed a crime, they often said it due to the feeling of being disrespected or more colloquially “I felt dis’ed”).


The comfort of our lives has a bearing with our anxiety level. Our feelings of anxiety or otherwise is depended on respect; respect for self, respect for others and feeling that we are respected. Imagine how you would feel being asked to give a speech in a meeting with five other colleagues. The level of anxiety and its attendant stress is changed if you are then told in the middle of the speech that there is a camera in the room and the speech is being transmitted on live TV. In the end our actions can be greatly influenced by what we think is the opinion of others.

However, should our lives be dictated by the design of our jeans, the model of our car, the level/development of the community we live in? That sort of comparative living is at the root of the rat race. Some one has said that even if one wins a rat race, one is still a rat! Harsh but true. What is also true is that the majority of people are not watching what we do with our lives. Hence the subjective feeling of being disrespected is an exaggeration.

Respect in this piece extends to self-worth, the value we exact and the response we provoke. Respect for self and respect for others are personally generated. Hence we must carry ourselves with and treat others with respect. When it comes to feeling of being respected by others, we ought to be comfortable with ourselves irrespective of the position we occupy in the scale of a competitive society. There in is our true value.