How Can We Be Better Passers-By?

If we can choose a face, how would we choose it? What kind of face would best express our true inner selves? What kind of face would make other people like or respect us? Do these two hypothetical faces bear any resemblance to each other? Is there a face that would combine their best features? It seems like there is often an embarrassing disconnect between how we try to present ourselves and how we’re actually perceived. This is probably the main reason why we tend to ask our friends to tell us honestly how we look in a new attire.

“Do I look good in this? Do I look better in that? How about this?”

The main principles of dressing up and being an awesome human-being are pretty much the same. They are as such: (1) We must be unique, brave and affectionate, (2) but not too much. There is a fine line between being unique and being weird, and whether we cross it depends on how far we deviate from the norm. So we become somewhat disturbingly the same. We don’t want to be too right, neither do we want to be too wrong. Before we know it, we become one of those kids who contribute to a slow rising tone of “Aaaawwwwwwwww..." upon chancing a fist fight. Are we encouraging? Are we participating? What are we doing? Whose side are we on, anyway? The kid who landed the punch? The kid who got punched? The teacher’s? We are enjoying one of the oldest and most universal popular human pastimes.

We are enthusiastic passer-bys.

Now, majority of the discourse on the Internet is made up of such gleeful jeering at someone else’s disgrace. It is all fun and games when we’re walking by. So what for the insidious laugh that we can’t justify? I get it. No harm. No offense. We only start to understand what it means to be viscerally offended by the ugly, shrill and nasty loathsome noise when we’re no longer the passer-bys. We only start to empathize when we experience our outcry nullified. It is like when we’re flirting with a girl, we feel that we’re genuine and charming.

But when we overhear some other guy hitting on her, it is so sleazy, it makes us cringe.

Sometimes the way we act can be so instructively repulsive. We sprinkle our thoughts and comments around more liberally than we do with parmesan cheese on our spaghetti bolognese. Just because something needs to be told, doesn’t mean it needs to be heard. There is no sweet smoky taste of victory by adding fuel to the fire. It is a pointless cause, and until we reach the moment of sad clarity and understand that someone is paying the price for our wicked sense of fun, we’re not simply passers-by. We’re part of the oppression supporting everyone and no one without quite knowing why.