The food is magnificent, as authentic as anything I tasted when I lived in Paris — cue the accordion music. But even perfection has its tics.

Normally, service at this restaurant is sublime. But this night, I had a problem. After having a wonderful meal and then calculating a respectable tip of 20% on a pretty expensive bill, since the service was OK but not exceptional, I gave the waiter the money.

He disappeared.

Later on, while I was finishing my coffee, I noticed him glaring at me as he was flitting around the tables nearby.

Normally, I leave a tip between 30-40% because I used to work in a fast food joint and know that it isn’t exactly easy work.

However, I am also aware that nobody is owed a tip, and that it’s not my fault if the employer isn’t paying a decent salary. Just because I want to enjoy a nice salad doesn’t mean I am required to adopt the guy who brings it to my table.

So the glaring, and then the lack of a “thank you” for the tip was a little unnerving.

Then I did what I normally do whenever I have an experience that can fit into into a couple of short sentences: I hopped on Twitter.

Surprisingly, my complaint got a lot of “likes,” which goes to show you I’m not the only one who has had to deal with an ungrateful little whippersnapper. Of course, there were a bunch of current or former waitstaff who weighed in, calling me entitled, saying 20% was a pittance.

As I said before, I often tip up to 50% of the meal if the person serving it to me shows that they really appreciated my presence, albeit temporary, in their lives.

If they made me feel as if it wasn’t a burden to serve me and their name was not Job, it’s my default position to show gratitude with extra cash.

But the suggestion that a tip is owed, not earned, and the refusal to extend a simple “thank you” is a troubling commentary on something that has more to do with character than carbohydrates.

I’m tired of people assuming they have rights and privileges regardless of their own conduct. It’s not like I want a stranger to write me into her will if I hold the door open or let him go ahead of me in line.

Those are the normal reflexes of people who live in a civilized society.

I’m talking about the idea that if you extend yourself beyond what is expected in a particular social situation, that should be rewarded by the most valuable and least expensive of things: a smile and acknowledgment.

Waiters and waitresses have a hard job, but so do police officers, doctors, construction workers and even immigration lawyers. The last time I checked, no one was leaving money in a tip jar for me.

The assumption that even the most mediocre service deserves some kind of financial premium is wrong.

Sorry, but all of those kids who were raised by mommy and daddy to believe that they were special have morphed into presumptuous ingrates. That bread basket you just put on my table is not going to cure cancer.

That being said, I am still going to tip in a grandiose and generous manner when the person who is on the other side of the money acknowledges my humanity. There are a lot of young people who make my lattes, mix my Aperol spritzes and slice my pizza into exactly the correct size of slice who deserve not only a tip, but my genuine gratitude
for their genuine kindness.

As for those who think I owe them, this Karen — or Mademoiselle Carine, as the case may be — has better use for her hard-earned dough.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at cflowers1961@gmail.com.

Lately, though, that compassion has been lacking, and I suspect it’s due in no small part to our cavalier attitude toward unborn life. If you are capable of dehumanizing something at its most elemental level and packaging it as a wholly dependent appendage of a woman, it’s a short step from there to seeing older and ailing Americans as dependent appendages of society. Of course, we don’t put it in exactly those terms. No, we’re a lot smarter than that, which is how the terms “pro-choice” and “death with dignity” entered the popular lexicon. In “Through the Looking Glass,” Humpty Dumpty gives a fairly good summary of the nihilistic game plan so many of the pro-choice and pro-euthanasia people subscribe to: “When I use a word … it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

So when the rights brigade start on about the “right to choose” and the “right to die” and the “right to be left alone,” they are asserting dominion over the language that they use to make their narrow and specific points. But those who oppose abortion are not generally allowed to call ourselves “pro-life” in the media, as I myself found out when I once put that term in a column and it miraculously morphed into “anti-abortion.” Humpty was apparently a social progressive.

To those of you who kept reading after you heard the word “abortion,” my thanks. And to reward you for your perseverance, I will now get to the point.

Recently, a young woman named Brittany Maynard took her own life. I would have said “killed herself” but that doesn’t fully express the motivation behind her act. Brittany was suffering from a terminal form of cancer, and decided that she didn’t want to put herself or her family through the final months of debilitating pain. I understand that, of course, and I have some empathy for her predicament given the fact that my father died a long and lingering death from lung cancer. It was a time of pain and horror.

What I don’t understand is the way that Brittany announced to the world, almost as if she were challenging us to evolve to some higher level of consciousness, that she would take ownership of her own presence on this earth and its significance. Brittany did not kill herself. She “took” back what she thought she owned, her life. This presupposes that her highest obligation was to herself, and that she was her own “keeper,” so to speak. That is a dangerous point of view, because it flows directly from the idea that we are all separate, unconnected islands in this vast ocean of humanity and are ultimately alone.

This is the same mentality that motivated Ezekiel Emmanuel to write his notorious essay in the Atlantic, expressing a hope that he would die by the age of 70 so as not to “burden” society. At least Emmanuel was considering the impact his life would have on others, albeit in a very negative way. He didn’t want to upset anyone, so he made a vow to bow out, stage left, when he became “troublesome” to his family and friends. I suspect that if he’d asked, those friends and family would have begged him to complete the contract he’d made with God and science and keep the machine operating until its natural end. I’m fairly certain that what he viewed as a potential burden was, for them, a gift. But that wouldn’t have advanced his almost Darwinian view of survival.

As someone whose brother took his own life for reasons that, to this day, we do not know, I am fully aware of the power of autonomy. Brittany Maynard said that she felt less fearful because she could choose the hour and moment of her death. And as someone whose father was in excruciating pain and yet raged against the dying of the light, at the end, I know how strong the survival instinct can be if we don’t extinguish it with rhetoric about “dignified deaths.”

This past week, folks in Philadelphia heard the story of a little boy who was beaten to death by his mother and her boyfriend, an act so vile that even those of us who’ve been jaded by daily violence had to take a step back in horror. While there is no direct connection between the evil in a criminal’s soul and the desire to escape a painful death, both acts exist on the same continuum which quantifies the value of a life by how much pleasure it gives us.

To me, true dignity lies in cherishing the life that we are given in custody, whether in our wombs or in ourselves. It exists even in the face of pain and regret for lost possibilities.

Dylan Thomas wrote “and death shall have no dominion.”

We, the defiant steel links in the human chain, can be proof of that.