Every day of my life, I encounter kind, respectful people who hold doors for me, leave spaces for me to enter traffic, and share lovely interactions in public places.
Then, at least once per day, there’s someone who’s unnecessarily rude and belligerent, perhaps even threatening. I really don’t recall such levels of hostility, with such frequency and no provocation, when I was younger. All of my friends agree that this cultural aspect has greatly changed for the worse. If something nasty isn’t directed at me, I watch it happen to other people.
I find that it takes several of those pleasant encounters to restore me after one of the bad ones. Also, my life of the past year – one traumatic crisis after another – has left me much more brittle than I once was. Things that wouldn’t have bothered me before, or that maybe would have made me roll my eyes and laugh, are now very troublesome. I find it very terrible.
It all makes me wonder if someone who’s much more fragile than I am, a person who’s truly desperate and hopeless, might decide to give up. If somebody’s on the edge, for whatever reasons, can those extra doses of despondency push that person over?