Sometimes I fear that our driving skills and the comment sections of online articles are an indicator of the acceleration of the decline of the human race. People no longer pay attention to what they are doing on the roads hurtling forward in thousand pound death machines without a care in the world. If you read a comment section you'll see a variety of issues, from abhorrently poor reading comprehension skills to outright wickedness. Trolling aside, we are assholes in general. Though in most of my immediate and personal interaction with others, I am often reassured that maybe things are not so bad. Then, I try to sell concert tickets on Craigslist.
Here I am, you know me if you are reading this, sitting on 4, not 1 or 2 or 3, but FOUR tickets to a sold out show in Chicago that I no longer plan on attending, mostly because if I do, I will only be using 1 of the said tickets. (Sadly I listen to music that definitely does not interest my husband, or most friends for that matter.) So, in my naive mind I set out on this venture believing the following: This is going to be easy, it is a sold out show, electronic tickets. Meaning I just have to forward a simple email to the potential buyer who can send me the money electronically. We never have to meet, therefore, I do not have to fear being kidnapped, raped, and dismembered by some weirdo perusing Craigslist expressly for that reason, I do fully believe all of that is avoidable though. How horribly and soul destroying this logic proved.
It was not a simple transaction and people were actually mean. Not only were they mean, the mere mention of the fact that they were electronic tickets and not "hard copies" sent them on indignant tirades aimed squarely at my character and apparent stupidity at the notion that I must be a fool to think that I could trick them into my scam and web of lies. Because, apparently I am selling these tickets to multiple parties, sitting on a pile money laughing while victim upon victim is denied access from said concert. To them, my next step would be to put the money in some sort of offshore account, while I set up my new digs on a remote Caribbean island, where I will spend the rest of my life living in the lap of luxury subsidized by all my ill gained concert ticket money.
I am not sure why this is bothering me as much as it is. Do I really want to go to the concert, kind of, but I will be seeing the band a month later with my fantastic sister-in-law and her husband, probably the only 2 people on the planet who like similar music and going to shows with me. The fact that I bought the tickets, thinking I could entice a few friends to a free concert does not bother me, since it is at least the third time this has happened. It was the attack on my character by strangers who just assumed I was the kind of person who would screw them over. That is what bothers me. I consider myself an honest and relatively straight forward person. If you know me, I have the unfortunately talent of wearing every emotion that I am feeling at every moment directly on my face. I also hate being judged and I have always wanted people to like me, desperately. This whole Craigslist debacle has thrown in my direction all of my social fears in one fell swoop. Aside from all of that, it has sadly been a confirming experience in relation to my feelings of my fellow human beings. That we are more skeptical, un-trusting, willfully mean, and prone to disliking and judging others we come into contact with more than ever before.
Now every person on AIRBNB, or Craigslist, or our Uber driver is out to kill us, rape us, and dismember us. I am not saying that we should not remain vigilant or suspicious, but there is a line between hostile mistrust and healthy skepticism that we seem to have a hard time distinguishing. We hear the horror stories on a daily basis of the naively trusting being taken for a ride down the advantage highway. Grandpa is sending all of his money to a Nigerian prince, and our cousin's friend spent their paycheck on tickets from a "girl" in Kenosha who sold a bunch of e-tickets as a scam and they were not allowed into the concert. That woman on welfare is just abusing the system buying crab legs on food stamps and that man on disability and medicaid is just selling his Oxycontin making a giant profit. This just turns us into at the very least aggressively misguided in our interactions to establish our "positions", at worst, just plain bullies.
So, if we believe that everyone is equally awful until proven otherwise, where does that leave us? We do live in a hostile world, that is a fact, but what are our real threats? I have had some amazing experiences with my fellow human beings throughout the world. Strangers in small pubs in Norther Ireland, locals in Paris buying you dinner because they are stoked you came into their neighborhood restaurant, homeless people in San Diego smiling at you and wishing you good day even though you did not have a dollar to give them, and a Guatemalan taxi driver who takes you to his favorite restaurant and lets you use his cell phone to call back to the states because you gave him a chance to show you his country through his eyes. Not to mention the AIRBNB guests who have stayed at our place, or us staying at their place, giving us a glimpse into what makes them tick. I really could go on. But, if I treated everyone online with aggressive affirmation that, by God, they will not screw me over, or in person for that matter, there are so many things that I would have missed out on in life because that attitude is off-putting and who would want to open themselves up to a person like that? One of the biggest problems we face is the fact that we no longer have to fight for our survival, that is another blog post I will get into later, but it is also one of our biggest blessings. We do not really have to worry if the wine we buy is filled with a weird combination of things other than wine, or if an outlaw will appear out of the woods to slit our throats and steal our horses. There are big things now that we have to worry about though, that in the past we could have never imagined. Things that we can only overcome with the help of each other. We are a connected world, for the good and the bad, we need people to trust other people. We need other countries to trust other countries, and the like. We need to identify the real enemies, but we need to remain friendly and open. Sure there are dark entities amongst us, but if we allow them to take over our world view, then we are in danger of falling divided and alone.
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