why are some people so mean

to survive living in china, i often depended on the kindness of people that were fortunate enough to be in my immediate vicinity in a time of need.  for example, i know there is a post in here somewhere about the evil apple vendor who sold me rotten apples in the dark, and how his neighbor, the pumpkin seed vendor, chastised him and tried to help me get a refund.

but america is not china, and i am not a special laowai here. i'd be hard pressed to find a random person in the street here that was willing to join my cause, and even more hard pressed to find a pumpkin seed vendor who was willing to join my cause. sometimes i question if it is possible to have any fun in this country at all.

we all need a little help from a stranger sometimes though. i personally always need help with directions if i'm going anywhere other than my house in DC. i don't have a gps, i don't have a smartphone, and i tend to print out google maps and forget to take them with me. some may say that i am foolish, i say that i take the road less traveled, and that has made all the difference....the difference being that i got to drive through the ghetto and you didn't.

the other day i took a wrong turn trying to get to my soccer game at a new field, and quickly found myself in unfamiliar territory. in these cases i typically call zach, but he wasn't picking up. i looked around desperately for help at each stop light, but my pumpkin seed friend wasn't around, and no one was paying attention to me. finally, i found a man with dreads and a rastafarian hat.  rastafarian=peace, so i figured this would be my best shot. he saw me look at him and roll my window down, so he did the same.

as i suspected, he told me i was way off track. even as he had to pull away because the light turned green, he continued to shout directions to me out the car window. that is a true compadre.

of course, this is not a typical interaction with a fellow motorist, which brings me to the title of this post: why are some people so mean? why can't everyone be like rasta man?

drivers are the meanest people of them all around here. i wish i had a picture for every face that someone has made at me through their car window. if i were to take all of those pictures and put them together to make some kind of conglomerate picture, it would surely turn out as a rabid monkey.

zach will say that i am a mean driver too because one time in the car i flicked off a taxi driver behind me and said "hey, **** you!" out the window, but i would argue that i did this in a "new york" manner--i was pretty annoyed that he wouldn't stop beeping at me while i sat a red light and couldn't turn, but my blood pressure was fairly stable and my veins weren't popping out of my neck. everybody needs to throw their hands up every once in a while and get a good "**** you" in, doesn't mean you gotta be super angry. that's new york, right?

the worst are the people who yell at the customer service reps at the front desk. dealing with irate customers has to be the most humiliating thing. i saw this happen last week in an auto shop and felt bad for the guy so i was very nice to him afterwards when it was my turn, and he gave me the VIP discount for my new transmission. it was like i was in china all over again. the lesson is that no matter where you are, good things happen when you are nice to people.

so it is imperative that we do something about all these mean people, they have gotten carried away.  i think humor and shaming work well to change people's behavior. rabid monkey PSA campaign?