Man on the Street

Last night my roommate and I were walking home after an attempt to lighten our moods. We've both been under uncommonly high stress the last few weeks. There's no need to go into details, you only need look at the nightly economic reports to understand. It was a cool evening, one of the few before the Minnesotan summer sets in. We're both dreading the heat, humidity, and the electric bills for the air conditioner. The rain fell ponderously, creating wondrous patterns of reflected citylight. As we walked home, we tried to decide if we should put on a movie before going to bed. We passed by a pair of younger men, shorter than us, Latino. The shorter of the two stared and pointed, speaking a crude and accented cissexist remark. For a moment we were shocked. Shocked that something like this could happen here, in this state, so near our home. And then, the anger rose up in me. Still tempered by fear, I turn and remarked "And you're a fucking jerk." It came out at half-volume and unconvinced. Feeling disgust with myself I wanted to turn around, follow them, turn the tables on the fear they so casually doled out. But I didn't. We didn't; we could be killed for our pride. I tried to shake the feeling as we walked home. We unleashed our anger on inanimate objects around the house, no doubt startling the occupants below. How could someone do such a thing? To take an two entire people, in all their complexities, their histories, their thoughts, desires, and struggles, and reduce them all to a blunt slur? Because it's easy. It's easy to dehumanize another. We do it all the time, everyday, and we never even notice. We lump people together in categories, unaccepted, unchallenged, anonymous and merciless. We turn off empathy without a thought. It's not harmless. It's not "the way things are". It's what we've done to ourselves.