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most people are nice

this woman could use some respite...

"...my neighbors are very nice people. Step away from negative media for a bit and realize the US isn’t some asylum and that most people are good, normal people. Don’t let outrage and hysteric media taint your perspective."

Even you will only say "most" people, not all people, because you recognize that it only takes one person to kill 100 others in the space of five minutes. If even 1% of the population is a threat, we are all at risk. You've heard, possibly even said the phrase "this is why we can't have nice things", haven't you?

To be quite clear, in my experience "most" people are only kind and compassionate to the people in their in-group. They are cold and uncaring if you are an outsider. Even as a privileged white woman, the abuse and exclusion I've received for my disability and my neurodivergence has taught me that this country is an unkind one, that the norm is to be an asshole to anyone you don't actively care about, and that includes strangers. There are very, very few people who live as if all lives actually matter to them - it's overwhelmingly, "well, all lives matter, but that person deserves what they got because they're x". Poor, disabled, Black or Brown or whatever - if all lives truly mattered to those people, they would up in arms over the injustice and illegality of every person in their city killed by police without a fair trial. *It's illegal for a reason.* They would be providing mentorship, respite care, fostering, and adopting children - not out of a savior complex, but simply out of the recognition that raising kids *requires* a village, that children need to have *many* trusted adults in their lives, that especially in this post-"latchkey" generation, where 13 hour shifts for both parents is so common, everyone needs more support than ever.

Perhaps the problem and the solution are so simple as your advice suggests; more people need to separate themselves from the corporations' entertainment, they need to encounter strangers and make new friends. After all, insularity happens to everyone - when you isolate yourself inside a clique, you fail to notice when you are being the asshole to outsiders - they won't give you copious feedback because you're strangers, and because of self-justification you become resistant to the slight indications such as tone and glaring. Eventually when they do snap, and provide you with unignorable feedback, you call them the asshole, and now any behavior on your part is truly justified - but only in your mind. 

In order to break this cycle, you have to be constantly engaging with new people and *believing* them when they tell you what their experience has been. You cannot build a relationship with someone if you think their experience is an overreaction. Because trust me, anyone who dismisses my *personal experience* like it's just some overreactive television news report is exactly the toxic asshole I'm talking about, the "normal person" that makes this country so painful to be in. People like that enable and encourage even worse abuse everywhere they go. Hell, those are the people who complain about wearing face masks, and encourage others to leave theirs off!

But perhaps that solution is still too minor, too individual. Perhaps the real problem is an issue with the way our corporations find every legal loophole in order to scrape every last cent out of their employees. By keeping us at work, or by giving us home-work, they keep us away from others, they suck the energy we need to create and maintain our relationships and isolate us. There's no passion for art in the media anymore, there's no discussion of poetry on the streets; even the buskers play covers of the top 5 instead of their own original work. Society is being crushed by exhaustion, my friend, and exhaustion breeds insularity, violence, and everything else. No individual person has the power to fix that.
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