Further thoughts here, as a side shoot to my blog about the 94-year-old woman giving way to people on the pavement and on station steps:
There should be more publicity to raise awareness of the issue of civic mindedness / 公德心 / gōng dé xīn / "public virtue heart".
It is true that I have a soft spot for old people (have been since a child), but the bigger issue is that people cannot help getting old and becoming frail, so they (old people) need extra help. Not just help in giving them a walking stick, a zimmer frame, a wheelchair, or a carer who comes to their homes to feed and wash them.
The culture over here is (/ seems to be, to me) not to come across as being too "controlling" of people (or one's own children), so all the things I'd been taught as a child in Singapore (under the civic mindedness umbrella of being respectful, considerate, caring, supportive and unselfish) do not seem to be actively filtered down that much to the younger generation, from my own observations.
To be fair, I have seen some parents teaching their children to be considerate and all that, on public transport, but it is a very small percentage of the population, I'm afraid, from what I've seen.
I do whizz around London quite a bit on my Freedom Pass, zooming from allotment (in east London) to soup kitchen meals in west London (eating as a diner, and helping out as a volunteer at one of them). So, I do get quite a lot of exposure to human behaviour, including parenting (good or non-existent).
The current buzz focus seems to be on old age and the situations that come with it, e.g., dementia. I think there should also be more focus on instilling in the younger generation over here the kind of civic mindedness that I'd been brought up on in Singapore in the 1960s.
(London, 2026)
https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2026/11/good-practices-14-asking-people-to-make.html
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