(no subject)
The other day I was riding my bike down a residential neighborhood, on my way back from one of my many little expeditions/exercises, and witnessed a little nuance that really bothered me. It was a mother, taking her child out of her car into the house who glanced at me with a loathsome amount of distrust. Here was this person who I just happened to exchange glances with. One I have never seen before nor will I ever see again, and yet she seemed almost frightened by my appearance. Now I may look many things, but intimidating was never one of them, and I cant help but wonder about how fucked up things are such that you automatically distrust everyone and everything you see.
This woman wasnt suffering from some kind of erratic paranoia, she was just demonstrating something that I immediately realized was kind of a cultural norm for many of us Americans. I was brought up being told by everyone and everything I've ever known that the world is a cruel place. My parents always told me never to trust strangers, but when you look at it, what kind of shitty mentality is that? What happened to the fabled days where kids would hitch-hike home from school with total strangers, when a visitor to your home was cause for celebration, not caution? I know I'm beating an allready significantly dead horse with all this, but its just really one of those epiphanies that you have from time to time.
I wont brood over it, although its certainly easy to see why people see the state of our race and get depressed. I wonder if there is a "cure" for it all. It almost seems sometimes that society is pushing in the wrong direction sometimes, but I wonder if I held the strings to the world, if I could figure out how to fix the inherent distrust that grips us.
This woman wasnt suffering from some kind of erratic paranoia, she was just demonstrating something that I immediately realized was kind of a cultural norm for many of us Americans. I was brought up being told by everyone and everything I've ever known that the world is a cruel place. My parents always told me never to trust strangers, but when you look at it, what kind of shitty mentality is that? What happened to the fabled days where kids would hitch-hike home from school with total strangers, when a visitor to your home was cause for celebration, not caution? I know I'm beating an allready significantly dead horse with all this, but its just really one of those epiphanies that you have from time to time.
I wont brood over it, although its certainly easy to see why people see the state of our race and get depressed. I wonder if there is a "cure" for it all. It almost seems sometimes that society is pushing in the wrong direction sometimes, but I wonder if I held the strings to the world, if I could figure out how to fix the inherent distrust that grips us.