more sappy stuff about tolerance

I’m on a business trip near San Francisco, and after work I stop at a mall. As I’m leaving, I notice a sweatshirt and fanny pack lying in the parking lot. I look around – no one visible, except for some teenagers doing tricks on BMX bikes a couple hundred yards away in another area of the parking lot.
I stop my car, pick up the bag – I figure I can turn it in to the police substation in the mall. I start looking in the bag for some ID, and the next thing I know, there’s a kid on a bike swearing at me through the window of the car -- he’s so stressed that he can’t even talk clearly. Obviously, the bag is his and he thinks I’m going to take it.
I open the door and say “If it’s your bag, go ahead and take it.” He reaches in, grabs the bag, and yanks it violently out the door – since it’s open, his ID and papers and money and whatever else fly into the air in a spectacular Personal Property Explosion, and patter to the ground around him. Still swearing, he starts picking it up – I say “You know, if I’d wanted to steal it, I’d have been gone already.”

Then I drive away, annoyed and frustrated. It’s difficult to accept an abrupt change in your status: a few seconds ago (in my own mind) I had been Noble and Honest Citizen, ready to graciously brush off the praise and tearful thanks of a person who had lost their stuff. In the space of two seconds, I was converted to Dirty Rotten Thief, or at best Lamester Messing With My Stuff. It was a bit of a come-down.

And I can’t really blame the kid for being excited – it would really honk to lose your purse-equivalent. And I’ve learned (okay, my dad pointed out to me) that for some people, their whole life is a struggle anyway – hard family situation, financial issues, past abuse, tragedy, whatever – and one of the ways they cope is to put on emotional armor first thing every morning. Conflict is normal for these people; battle is what they expect most situations to become. And of course, their all-hands-on-deck-prepare-to-repel-boarders attitude actually *creates* conflict, further reinforcing their need for a take-no-prisoners approach to life.

So as my dad said: On some level, most of us are walking wounded – be kind.