The other day I went to lunch and saw two sisters get into a huge argument over something completely trivial. The older sister had gotten mad at the younger one for taking a drink out of her water bottle. However, I knew that wasn’t the actual reason the older sister was mad; in the previous class someone had irritated her and put her in a bad mood. Her sister didn’t have this key information and thus started an irrelevant argument that lasted the whole lunch.

I’ve done this more than I care to admit. Someone or something will irritate me and I come home and get an attitude with my sister, which inevitably starts an argument.

Just the other day I had an incident where my one of my group partners wouldn’t do their share of the work and I ended up having to do it over my lunch period. When I got home yelled at my sister for not having taken out the trash.

Clearly, I am a hypocrite. Instead of confronting the person in my group that actually made me mad or just letting it go, I took it out on my sister. In my head I justified it with the fact that she is family, so it’s ok and we’ll both get over it eventually.

Family is supposed to stick with you through thick and thin, so taking your anger out on them is ok, right? It’s better than yelling at a random stranger in the street like a lunatic. However, this does not make it morally right. Just because they’re family doesn’t mean that it’s okay to verbally attack them; in fact, I think that family deserves more respect.

Even if you and your sister or brother don’t have the best relationship, you should at the very least give them the respect you would another human being. When arguments like these happen, we are making it clear that we don’t have a high opinion of someone that we supposedly care for.

There are those in the world that can’t even see their siblings and would give anything in the world to do so because they value them that much. So why don’t those who are lucky to see them every day do the same?