This is not a note before the end.
But it could be. I imagine that it has been. The ordinary cruelty of people has been enough to force people from this life before their time. I know this with certainty.
The point of note is that it could be. The casual dehumanizing we all take part in day-by-day is enough. It is too much, too often, too easily inflicted. We no longer treat other people as themselves, but as mirrors to peer upon ourselves through. Objects. Yet each one of us is steeped in a complexity of experience that, would they be known among us all, they would bring us each to stiffened breath, and flood our veins with empathy. In this modern world, in this modern way, people have become cruel. Too harsh, too hasty, too quick to judge. Too quick to draw conclusions and cast aspersions. This world is painful for the sensitive. It hardens soft souls, or it kills them.
But rather than face this reality we ignore it. We refuse to see the affect that our unthinking default has.
And so, we resist the flow of other lives, not wishing to be burdened by the pain we ourselves have played a role in inflicting. We stoke the flame of denial. Because facing up to the casual nature of our cruelty would disrupt the blanket refuge of our comfort. We’d rather not think about how we spoke to him, or how we behaved towards her, because after all it wasn’t a big deal and they probably deserved it. But each time we write someone off, or dismiss an entire life as not worth it, we damage not only them, but ourselves too, our souls peppered with cigarette burns from leaving ourselves down; because how we interact with people we don’t know or care for shows us our truest nature.
Callousness has become so embedded in the way we communicate that it’s no longer deemed interesting enough to even note. It is to be expected. Harshness by default until you prove that you deserve otherwise. The individual is hardly at fault here, either. We simply respond to the world as it approaches. Sickness cannot be blamed on those inflicted by it. And our world has been designed to make us sick, to make us bitter and cruel and accepting of it.
The way we so often treat each other is not kindness. It is far from it. It is unhuman. Robotic. Grotesque. We do not see one another as people. We no longer even attempt to understand what another person might be experiencing. We shout and spew vile words without even momentarily considering that the other person is indeed a person. They are not a person to us though, but rather a non-compliant mirror that must be eradicated. And I wonder then, is our tendency to treat others as less than human because we no longer see ourselves as human either?
Everything has become transactional in this world. And so if you cannot give me exactly what I want now I can simply disregard who you are and find someone else that will. Instantly gratifying our every want and need has eradicated a necessity to be still and reflect upon how we treat other people. We do not need to reflect because it no longer matters how we treat others. They can be tossed aside and the next persons will be found through algorithms and twitter threads so that I never have to consider the casual cruelty I send out like half-thought tweets. Because there is always someone else, someone new, someone better, who will validate away all the pain I have caused. And I never have to feel the necessary burden of knowing that I made someone else feel small enough that they thought, even for just a single moment, that they were worth so little that this planet didn’t need them.
The true nature of our cruelty isn’t obvious. It isn’t a standout villain. It isn’t an amplified gesture. Our cruelty is quiet. It is incremental. It is maddening. And it is dished out so casually, so ordinarily, that we think of it as kindness.