It was Christmas 2018, and thousands of flights had been cancelled due to crappy weather across the country and technical glitches that downed flight systems for hours.
And I’m smiling, because this is funny — watching a full-grown adult rip into another person who’s just trying to do their job that they’re probably being grossly under compensated for, for a company that they probably hate as much as the customer who’s yelling.

I’d never felt so much tension in an airport before — a minor inconvenience for thousands of passengers during their holiday travels was now turning into a screaming match between them and another person.

Like they genuinely believed that THE LOUDER I YELL, THE MORE THIS PERSON WILL WANT TO RESPOND POSITIVELY TO MY ANGER.

I’ve never understood that — when people are online at a coffee shop or waiting for their food at a restaurant, how people can sink so low.

How people can believe that they’re important enough that in order to get what they want, they must cause other people to suffer.

I think that only causes people to hate themselves as much as they might hate others.
Maybe more so.

…

In light of everything that’s been happening with CoVid and the incoming recession that will surely follow, we’re all going to want to shrink inward.

For self-protection, we’ll need to focus a lot on ourselves — ensuring all of our financial, mental, and physical needs are being met, that our family is in good-health, and that our relatives are taken care of.

That’s good in that it brings us closer together with our family, it forces us to make sacrifices in our finances, and teaches us to cut the fat in areas of our lives that simply aren’t working (like businesses, etc.).

But we’ll also start to see a lot more greed, tension, lashing out, and general anger towards one another.

(You’ll also see wild misinformation from people who are grossly under-qualified to comment on the nature of pandemics — please, be diligent in checking where you’re getting your information from.)

Recessions often bring about the best and the worst in people, and this one will certainly be no exception.

For many, anger is a completely just emotion — as we’re already starting to see, families that are already living paycheck to paycheck or whose day-to-day meals are typically being covered by the public school system are already starting to hurt.

But for others, that anger is often a product of circumstances that are entirely out of their control, that they wish they could control: job loss, short-term losses in the market, poor sales forecasts, or missed mortgage payments.

And in an effort to curb their bad feelings, they try to spill their hatred and anger out towards other people.

My only encouragement for you over the next few months and years and however long left you have on this earth is this: be kind.

Because, in times like this, kindness is difficult.

It’s difficult to find in yourself, and it’s especially difficult to show to other people when you’re going through a deeply painful period in your life.

Putting more pain out into the world is easy when you’re hurting.

But finding kindness in yourself and sharing it with others is hard.

Especially if you stand to gain nothing from that kindness.

But it’s important.

Because we’re all hurting.
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Maybe you can help us hurt just a bit less.
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