How Can People Be So Heartless?

This is how I've felt for most of the week. I am grateful for the kindness of a very few decent people. I am still saddened by the animosity displayed towards me from a person for whom I've felt a mutual respect and, I thought, something of a friendship, for a number of years. Yet I cannot allow one person's bitterness to destroy me. It is dismaying to discover that someone for whom you have respect turns out to be someone who makes themselves feel bigger by making others feel small.

Yet this is only my own unhappy discovery. Indeed, many suffer. Most people really do not seem to care about the suffering of their fellow human or creature. There are too many suffering for any one of us to help. Yet if we all helped one another, would not that suffering be made smaller?

The least we can do is try not to make things worse for each other. Does it really help to hurt a cat, kick a dog, beat up someone weaker than yourself? Does it even help to throw verbal barbs at someone who is fat, gay, mentally ill, mentally retarded, transgendered, or otherwise different? Do you really feel good when you realize how much you hurt that person or creature? If so, why? What is missing in you that this sort of behavior makes you feel bigger? Has your heart truly shrunk to such a size that the only thing that can inflate your ego is to demean other people and beings?

Most of us are struggling. Would it not make us feel better to pull our fellows from the raging stream and prevent them from being dragged under than to hurl stones at them?

I have very little faith in humanity to do the right thing as a whole. Yet sometimes there are people who shine as bright lights in the darkness.

A thanks to those people. You are rare and beautiful.

A wish for bright blessings upon you from your battered and bruised but still kicking chum,

Tempest Nightingale LeTrope

A curmudgeon by experience attempting not to be a misanthrope to those downtrodden who don't deserve it

(The Kardashians and the Hiltons and their ostentatious ilk are fair game)