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Friday night
The rabbi gave a good talk about how we treat each other, starting with the midrash that explains why Aharon, and not Moshe, delivered the first two plagues to Mitzrayim (Egypt). Specifically, according to what the rabbi said (and I've heard this one elsewhere too), Moshe objected to God that he couldn't possibly strike the Nile and the sand, because the Nile had saved his life when he was an infant (carrying him to Paro's daughter, who adopted him) and the sand had saved him when he killed the Egyptian taskmaster, by covering the body. So out of respect for the river and the sand, God had Aharon strike them instead.
Now also consider this: on Shabbat we cover the challah while making kiddush over the wine. Why? Because we do not want to "offend" the challah by giving the wine precedence, so we cover it until we're ready for it. (There is a story, I think talmudic, about a man who covers his challah but berates his wife, but the rabbi didn't bring that one up.)
The point of all of this is: if we (in the case of Shabbat) or our forebears (in the case of Moshe) show that much consideration for objects, how much moreso should we show respect for other people. The message isn't new, but he delivered it well. (In my experience, though, what people really need are concrete steps, not broad goals, to change stuff like this, and he didn't offer those.)
This afternoon I read the final (for now) issue of "Bentsch Press", a newsletter Rabbi Mordechai Kamenetzky has been publishing for the last year. It's a good newsletter -- mostly a collection of his thoughts, which are well-written and interesting. He said in the final issue that while he's had no shortage of material to write about, the mechanics of publishing a newsletter are just too much of a pain. It sounds to me like what the rabbi really needs is an LJ. :-) (Well, a web site would do, but I get the impression that he's not set up to do that on his own.)