Here’s an example: my husband is an avid cyclist, and he has many, many stories that involve drivers yelling at cyclists to “get off the road,” and said drivers swerving to drive a cyclist off a road or simply to make him shit in his own cycling pants. Why on The Inexistent God’s Green Earth would someone care if there’s a cyclist, or a bunch of cyclists, sharing their road with them? Why would someone care if someone they consider to be overweight is eating [insert food here that many attribute to obesity]? Why should anyone care if someone in a wheelchair is going slower than the people walking around them?

It makes me wonder if this assholishness is simply innate to some people, and if we, as a culture, perpetuate it simply by not being strong enough or by being too confrontationally-averse to consistently call that bullshit out for what it is. Perhaps I’m experiencing a disconnect between the way my life is lived and my appreciation of what it was like in yonder days when speaking out against violence or threatened violence put you in the path of the powerful and thus made you the threatened, but I can’t help but wonder if the herd mentality – or sheep mentality, specifically – is at the crux of this war on Others, down to judging the tiniest unimportant detail.

This is why the term “humanism” appeals to me so thoroughly.

And I reserve the right to judge those people who don’t put their shopping carts away in the parking lot or people who discard items on the shelves at the checkout line instead of not being lazy and putting the items where they belong. Fuckers.