Hard Lesson Learned

It has been a crazy week, which resulted in a long week. I won't bore you with ALL the details, but I mentioned in my last post that I was steaming mad. Our new tenants that just moved in on the first of this month, and whom Stephen and I have already bent over backwards for, decided to take advantage of their situation and threatened to withhold rent for reasons out of our control. The complaints were unfounded, and certainly not within their right (either morally or legally) to withhold rent. However, after a lot of back and forth, I believe we may have some resolved the situation.

Now, I'm not complaining about them or the situation they found themselves in. They had a right to be frustrated about things not working and to let their landlord know about it. Heck, if I were in their situation, I may have been just as frustrated! Where I'm upset is how poorly they handled the situation. Instead of coming to us respectfully and saying they were frustrated, they chose to handle their frustration by threatening to withhold rent. Rather than walking upstairs and letting us know, they opted to write it in a strongly-worded e-mail. And rather than give us consideration for what we've done for them - which is FAR MORE than what many landlords would do - they opted to use that as an excuse to DEMAND more things.

I guess this is a lesson learned for us as landlords, and an even harder lesson learned as human beings. But I have to ask:
-When did people stop being GRATEFUL for what they're getting (or have) and instead choose to focus only on what they're not getting?
-When did DECENCY and RESPECT go by the wayside?
-When did people stop looking out for each other and decided to look no further than themselves?

I guess it's been this way for a while now, but I don't want to give up just yet. I want to believe that people are still capable of good, that they're not always in it for themselves. I want to believe that people can be grateful for what they have, even if sometimes they wish had more. I want to believe that despite how LUCKY we've been and how HARD we've worked to own a house at a young age, that it doesn't mean we don't deserve to have respect from others our age who haven't been so lucky.