Brutality

Today, I bore witness to  so much brutality, I don't even want to be part of the human race anymore. Perhaps I will self-identify as a wolverine or a honey badger or a starving polar bear or something like the aforementioned beasts, something far less vicious than a human.

No, I'm not joining the Furry movement (not that there's anything wrong with that). What the world around me today affirmed was something I already knew having spent a lot of my adult life working retail jobs: so very many people are cruel just for the sake of being cruel. Thing is cruelty has consequences and not usually for the perpetrators of said cruelty. Though really it does, it just doesn't always manifest itself immediately. Cruelty damages the soul.

I won't go into the long list of egregious behavior swirling like a perfect storm around what had been my newfound peace and prosperity. It ranged from verbal abuse to physical violation and oddly enough almost none of it was directed at me, but it affected me. I had to make some hard decisions but in the end I know they were good decisions.

Stand by a friend who made an honest but potentially disastrous mistake. Withdraw my son from an unhealthy environment and kudos to my son for seeing it for what it was long before anyone else did. Stop participating in an argument that's lasted over a decade. Any one of those decisions would have made today exhausting. All combined together and stemming from vastly different pieces of my personal jigsaw puzzle, I am leveled. When I need sleep the most it eludes me yet again.

As I lie here, smirking at the sheep I should be counting, I take comfort in the words of Morrissey: "It's so easy to laugh, it's so easy to hate, it takes strength to be gentle and kind." To all those affected by the ugliness of the day's revelations, I pray you will be strong. That's all one can do, pray and do the hard thing. Don't pay the brutality forward because then you become no better than the assholes trying to drag you into their world of misery.

To kinder, gentler days, my friends.

Namaste,
Cindy