What is it, I thought, that has someone react with such venom when someone else is clearly under enormous stress? Isn’t that stress, or distress, the source of their erratic and disturbing behavior in the first place? I think that our sense of knowing each other, our sense that each person is doing their best at any given moment, that we are somehow in this together, is hidden from our view and missing in our hearts. This hole in our social fabric, this fraying of our knowing each other, of our sense of deep and real connection to all living being, permits us not to notice, or to even assume the best. This tear in the social fabric makes it ok to beep and yell and gesture in ways that only cause more harm.