I really dislike busy bodies, and my neighbourhood is full of them. Today I was walking along the shoreline, and happened upon a sixty-ish woman remonstrate with a mother and her young son. The older woman was telling the mother that her son shouldn’t be–get this–tossing rocks into the water. Her argument seemed to be that the rocks were artificially dumped there as part of the retaining wall.
I walked past, shaking my head. The mother dismissed the woman, and so the older woman was walking behind me. For a minute, I was torn between my urge to tell this woman off and to keep my counsel. I choose the former and turned around. The following conversation ensued (edited to make me sound more articulate):
ME: Excuse me, I overheard your conversation with that woman.
WOMAN: Yes.
ME: Well, those rocks are eventually going to be moved by the tide anyway.
WOMAN: But if everyone did that, those rocks would be gone.
ME: How many people do you see throwing rocks in the water? I see one small boy. Even if he did that every day, and his ten friends did it too, I don’t think that would have a meaningful impact on our taxes, do you?
WOMAN: It’s like the other day, this guy let his two dogs crap by those bushes and didn’t clean it up.
ME: The difference there is that that’s against the law. Throwing rocks in the water isn’t. If you want to make that against the law, I suggest you lobby your city councilor. It’s not for us to make rules about what people can and can’t do.
WOMAN: Well, I guess that’s why everything’s going to hell.
ME: I guess so.
With that, she walked off. I know that Polonius advises us to ‘give every man thy ear, but few thy voice’, but I couldn’t resist. If nothing else, I didn’t want the kid to be chastised for something that wasn’t wrong.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
An alternate approach might have been to tell the kid that _you_ think throwing rocks is cool – or to hand him a few rocks to throw while the old lady looks on.
Likely, though, the more subtle approach would have been quite beyond me if I was actually there in real time.
By saying to the old lady that you overheard her conversation makes you abusybody too doesn’t it??? lol
Laree: That thought did cross my mind, and maybe you’re right. Still, I hope I was busybodying for good, not evil.
Better yet, I would have picked up a few rocks and thrown them in myself. 🙂
Talk about busy-bodies: I work in a ….agency where we are suppose to be adults and most are at least in age, yet we do have one gossiper. This person thinks it’s their role to tell other divisions which is connected to our correctional agency how to conduct their own business matters. Not only does this particular person “mind others business,†but she also talks about our clients, personal issues “unrelated to the job,†tells our younger clients nasty things about themselves and family members, continuously talks about how she is one of the chosen ones who are going to heaven (we work in a diversified field that have individuals from many different faiths), she has asked me on several different occasions about my supervisors personal issues and family….the point is the world is full of individuals like this who also claim to be Christians and is really a distortion of what God/Jesus…is really suppose to be like.
I think you did a good job handling this situation, keep up the good work!!