We mess up, our plans go awry, comments meant to be light and funny sometimes fall badly, shattering into sharp pieces in the awkwardness they produce.  Our best plans, our smartest theories, turn out to be less brilliant than we thought.

When angry at someone it is easy to reduce them to the sum of their aggravating faults, forget that they are frail humans to whom a certain degree of self-blindness and hypocrisy is as natural as walking on two legs.   If they hurt us once, shame on them.   If they hurt us again and again, in extreme cases we are driven to become the leader of our nation and unleash a vast coordinated killing campaign.  Bombs, missiles, machine guns, flame throwers, burning chemicals dropped from the sky, torture and endless detention, relentless pursuit of enemy and friend of enemy alike, collateral damage be damned.  A slightly less insane approach is to accumulate billions of dollars and build beautiful houses for ourselves every place that we like, and to scream that we are victims of a holocaust if anyone speaks of taxing us fairly.  And there are less and less insane ways to deal with hurt all the way down to the saintly one of quickly forgiving all who mistreat us.  If someone hurts you and apologizes, it is a good practice to accept the apology and move on.  If someone hurts you and steadfastly refuses to allow that they’ve behaved badly, that’s a trickier situation.

Outside, in raging winter winds bringing single digit wind-chill, if the radio is to be believed, overly loud speakers somewhere nearby, perhaps on the campus of the college a few hundred feet from here, blared an auto-tuned hip hop number that was mildly annoying.  As I tried to gather my thoughts with the recorded drum pounding, “I Love Music” by the O’Jays made a cameo and I thought of the irony, the random, unintended ingenuity, of using one of a person’s favorite songs as a bludgeon upside the head.  Now it is just a kick drum, bap! BAP! bap! bap!, and a small voice wailing like a baby who’s been punched by an insane parent or guardian.  Somebody’s idea of a groovy time over there, no doubt.

Where the line is between overlooking a friend’s occasional bad mood and swallowing abusive behavior is sometimes hard to say in the individual case.   The case can always be made that the other person is only human, and sometimes humans slip up, do hurtful things.  Hell, humans organize lynch mobs, scream with veins popping on their necks and faces and are not satisfied until someone is mutilated.  Humans, it must be said, also rush into burning buildings to rescue small frightened animals.

One of the great personal dilemmas is to stay in a posture of forgiveness toward friends and family, while not tolerating abusive patterns that are sometimes subtle and dangerous.  They are dangerous precisely because they are subtle, easily denied and made to appear as figments of your oversensitive imagination rather than concrete hurtful actions done in a thoughtless or cruel way.  The subtle hurtful behaviors are easily justified, satisfyingly employed as small, sharp whips, to lash sensitive places on the face while telling the injured party that they are insane.   The beauty part?  Insane people often do believe innocent behaviors to be subtle, dangerous, hurtful, used as small, sharp whips to lash sensitive places on the face while the whipper puts on the most innocent of faces and tells them they are insane to feel that way.