How does the meanness grow?

The Boston Herald

They were walking down the street coming toward each other from opposite directions, carrying books, obviously on their way home from school.

She wore a cotton skirt and a navy blue sweater and a white headband in her dark brown hair. He wore pants and a green-and-white windbreaker and a Little League baseball cap. Both were about 9 or 10 years old and strangers, you could tell, because they didn't hurry toward one another, or wave, or roll their eyes, or smile.

But they didn't study the ground or turn away, either. They just kept on walking, and when they arrived at that place where they were almost side by side, they looked right at each other and smiled. It was an automatic thing, over in a second, nothing but everything, two strangers making human contact.

I sat in traffic and watched them and I smiled, too, because it was a tender moment, full of the kind of trust that makes a puppy approach a stranger with its tail wagging, a moment full of goodness.

These children hadn't been afraid of one another. They hadn't felt threatened. They were just kids on their way home from school who passed each other by, but connected, too, for however briefly.

The traffic moved and I continued on to a place where older kids gathered in doorways and in corridors and there the feeling was totally different. Teenagers stood around in groups talking and laughing, and in groups they appeared invincible. You could see the camaraderie in the body language, in an arm around a shoulder, in the good-natured shove; and hear it in all the high-pitched, exaggerated laughter.

Yet when a solitary person walked by, the group fell silent and stared as the interloper passed and the silence was full of tension and unease and the unspoken message: you don't belong.

This was nothing, too. Nothing, but everything, because it's an accumulation of these small, uninspected moments that molds every one of us into who we are. A member of a group grows stronger, braver, more brazen every time a group exerts its collective power. A solitary person cowered by a group, grows more frightened, more alienated and more helpless.

And so we become who we are: Alienated people who don't make eye contact when we're walking alone down a street, or sitting alone on a train, or eating alone in a restaurant. Alone we don't reach out to people we don't know because strangers are potential enemies, not potential friends. Alone we are uneasy because we are the product of our environment, the sum of our experiences and our experiences tell us: Beware.

The same day I saw the two little children smile at one another - a spontaneous, unlearned act - then the teenagers intimidate one another, I pulled my car out of my driveway and a sedan a half-dozen houses away, aggressively accelerated, honked its horn, swerved dramatically into oncoming traffic and passed me. Then all the way down the street, the driver of this car, a man in his 50s, held his middle finger high in the air. He did this for a more than a mile. And he did this with glee.

Is this unnecessary meanness something we carry inside us from birth? Are we born doomed? Does the meanness grow from seed to sapling then harden to stone as we age? Or is it the world that poisons all the good in us, that makes us hostile to one another, that pits people against people, that fills us with hate?

A man rams his car into a restaurant, then methodically shoots 22 people and it's horrible, but it isn't a shock anymore. It's reality. It's life in a world where people are gunned down and knifed and run over and beaten and abused with such regularity that we hardly wince anymore.

Experts will look for something for some incident, so they can say he did this because of that. It was drugs, or a traumatic childhood or a brain tumor, or a mental disease.

But in truth, it's the accumulated hurts and slights piled up day after day, year after year, that feed the meanness within each of us. It's the friendships not proffered, the love not given, the words not spoken, the things not done, that make a person stop caring about himself and anyone else.

The image lingers of those two children, two strangers going in different directions, but acknowledging each other, reaching out in a small way, but in the only way we all can.