Cruelty

The minor cruelties of life are the most socially erosive. I see examples of these minor cruelties every day in my crowded urban environment. The adolescent thug lounges across three subway seats as people stand around him in the aisles. Groups of young pedestrians push past a tenuously balanced elder on a crowded sidewalk. The entitled customer holds up a cashier line for no reason with little regard for those behind him. Drivers routinely risk the well being of others by running red lights.

When I walked into my 90-year-old mother's hospital room last evening on a relatively quiet hospital floor in a renowned urban hospital, I found that the meal server had placed her food tray just out of her reach and had not helped her raise her bed to an eating position. My mother, having had a hip replacement two days earlier, had been struggling to reach her meal prior to my arrival. I later saw the meal server when she collected the tray officiously. It was obvious that she was oblivious to how cruel and alienating her attitude was.

The minor cruelties add up to the major atrocities in society. This is a well known process. It can be reversed only by education and example. I consider it part of my practice as a humanist in society to foster attitudes of cooperation and consideration of all human beings in life situations. As a citizen, I believe I can do this best by modeling considerate and cooperative civil behavior in public situations. In work situations, modeling cooperative and considerate behavior with peers is a way of working against a culture of cruelty. As a supervisor, intervening against cruel or antisocial behavior is an ethical responsibility in my opinion.

The politics of fear in America have many side effects. One unfortunate side effect is the obvious hesitancy of people in public situations to engage with strangers. This generalized social isolation is destructive to the fiber of social cooperation and consideration. It makes open expression of compassion a rare commodity. And, it makes each of us more vulnerable to the cruelty of others.

Awareness

Riding the subway yesterday afternoon, during the early rush hour, I was impressed with the lack of awareness of my fellow passengers. Small incidents with large implications for society, in my opinion. During my long ride, several people were forced to push past a fellow passenger when a polite "excuse me" was totally ignored. These same polite passengers were then given annoyed or glaring looks by the person who ignored them and was pushed.

Exhausted iron workers, many of whom live in my community, holding heavy lunch coolers or tool bags, stood half asleep in the aisle over oblivious teenagers, playing with their iPhones and taking up two seats with their schoolbags. An elderly man with a cane stood while a young woman sat with her seven-year-old child and stared up at him with indifference. A gaggle of day-schoolers, most likely commuting from a private school, occupied a section of the train and loudly shared comments about pornography sites they were viewing on their iPhones. None of the adults near them seemed to notice or care.

I laugh at the touted concept that it takes a village to raise a child. I am reminded of the cult film, The King of Hearts (1966), in which inmates from an asylum escape and take over a nearby village after it is abandoned during WWII.

The general isolation of individuals in society is evident everywhere. This alienation has a corrosive effect on a culture. Having lived in Manhattan in the late 1980s, before the current Renaissance began, I can attest to the eventual effects of this process. Those effects are not pleasant. I am quite sure that the pseudo-intimacy of virtual communities will not help, but will give people more incentive to retreat to their screens when the real world becomes more and more inhospitable.

Simple awareness could do so much to remedy this trend. The Boston of my younger years was a place where people interacted readily on sidewalks and subways. It was a place where passers-by offered to carry groceries for a struggling pedestrian or stopped, without being asked, to give directions to tourists who were showing signs of being lost. We were aware of our surroundings, our neighbors. This is not a fuzzy, warm memory, summoned by nostalgia. It was truly the way it was.

In my own life, I still persist in maintaining public awareness. My age and its impact on my energies has tempered my ability to intervene in some situations, but I practice general openness to people on the street or on the subway. I make eye contact. I often offer a smile. I find myself giving directions quite a bit as a result and occasionally helping someone with a bundle or some other minor need. It makes me feel like I still belong to this human society and that I am still a contributing member of it.