Why Don't We Complain?

The narrative essay written by William F. Buckley Jr, “Why Don’t We Complain?” in my opinion is very realistic to a point. The author begins by setting the reader in a train where it is very hot though the temperature outside is freezing; the author then proceeds to tell us that he notices that everyone else in the train is hot too, but no one has complained. When he finally gets the courage to ask the conductor something he feels as if everyone is looking at him and he does not want to start a commotion. This story can be related to many people with different customs. For instance, in Miami if something is bothering a person the most likely thing that he or she will do is let it be known, whether it be in a sugar coated way or directly. On the contrary, someone with more high class in another part of the world may not complain because they don’t want to be seen as if something is bothering them, they don’t want people to murmur things about them.

The same thing can occur when we are at a restaurant. For example, if you are eating and you’ve asked the waiter for your drink a couple of times and they haven’t brought it the most likely thing to do is to tell the person in a bad way, maybe then they will get what you are asking for. The tricky part to asking someone for something more than once or twice is that the people that surround us at times want to be like the passengers in the train, unheard or unseen, they don’t want to make a spectacle, even when the truth of the matter is that we are in our every right to complain, because if we didn’t our voices wouldn’t be heard.

When the peak of the story arose I began to contemplate on what the author was saying. The truth is that he was stating something that was very true. The author says that because we live in an era where everything gets done for us with a flick of a finger we don’t pay much attention to the things that we are suppose to do, our voices become unheard. Before this age of technology if something was wrong with, for say, the air conditioner we had to do something about it, everyone had to be a little of everything, a plumber an electrician maybe even a mechanic, but because today we have people that specialize in those fields we fall back and we stoop learning, we stop complaining about things. Everyone should let their voices be heard and when something is wrong we should complain because there is going to come a point that we will become unheard of unseen and the things we want will not matter.