Cold realities of entitlement and expectation

After doing a few odds and ends this morning, I decided to head up to the summit of Mt Wellington and wander around in the cold wind and remaining snow remnants. I walked along the South Mt Wellington track for a while, among the open rocks and shrubs, thankful for my down jacket since the wind chill factor had the apparent temperature well below zero. Much of the snow from earlier in the week had gone, leaving a few drifts, often trampled, scattered among the boulders and alpine plants.

As I wandered my mind did as well, and I started reflecting on the nature of entitlement. On my drive to the summit I had passed cars parked by the side of the road, wherever they pleased to be close to the snow, and I recalled earlier in the week when there was traffic mayhem because people had just assumed they could all go up to the mountain (despite the closed road). There seems to be a growing sense of “if we can, we should” and “if we’re allowed to sometimes, then we should be allowed to all the time”; and an atmosphere that the world should be bent to accommodate our own desires; and an increase in the frequency of angry questioning and demanding when we can’t counteract circumstances beyond our control (there’d been a story last week about passengers stranded by a fault on a plane).

And while I was self-righteously musing, I was also ranting at the battery on my camera which wasn’t coping with the cold, and would only let me take a picture — and usually only one — if I stuck the camera under my armpit for a while.

Irony.