cruelty...

it is the one emotion/action i do not understand.   i do not know where to place it in the closet of hanging emotions i have waiting for me to pull out and wear for the day.  it has no hanger, drawer and i haven't been able to figure out how to fold it (sorta like fitted sheets)  i look at it in my hands wringing it and rolling it into a ball and throwing it in a lump in the far top shelf in the corner. its real and i see it everyday but it is not worth display.

i have no label for it.  no compassion for it.  no justification for it. no intellectual understanding of it.  it just makes me shake my head.  i saw a man walk passed a man standing outside the grocery store the other day as i was driving into the driveway.  the man standing was asking for a job, money or a prayer.  the other man  clipped him with his shoulder and called him "a piece of shit".    i don't understand it.  i didn't have a job or money for that man but i always have a prayer.  but in my opinion the cruel jerk needed the prayer more than the soul holding the sign.   i prayed separate and sincerely compassionate prayers for both of them.  

unprovoked cruelty,  cruelty meant to provoke...  i have resolved on a personal level, with the personal cruelty i deal with that retaliation of any kind is just cruelty dressed in justification clothes.  still cruelty but with an excuse.  its still cruelty even if you dress it up.    some feel provocation is all they need, in fact, they wait in hope for it  but it really isn't a "get out of jail free card".  cruelty stands alone and we decide what we will do with it once it is fired at us.   i have chosen what i want to do with it.  it takes practice, perhaps indefinitely, perhaps forever.   i cannot give my energy to cruelty in my life.   i choose to recognize it and to let it go.

what will happen when/if i am presented with it on a grander scale that has nothing to do my interpersonal relationships?  i don't know.   i put my faith in God that he will guide me to the best outcome.
~nina~

Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kid of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of cruelty.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable.
Jodie Foster

Cruelty towards others is always also cruelty towards ourselves. Paul Tillich

Cruelty would be delicious if one could only find some sort of cruelty that didn't really hurt. George Bernard Shaw

My doctrine is this, that if we see cruelty or wrong that we have the power to stop, and do nothing, we make ourselves sharers in the guilt. Anna Sewell

Now I say that with cruelty and oppression it is everybody's business to interfere when they see it. Anna Sewell

The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love - almost as violent and much more mischievous. Aldous Huxley

The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell. Bertrand Russell

The truth doesn't have to do with cruelty, the truth has to do with mercy. Ken Kesey

The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people. Martin Luther King, Jr.

To insult someone we call him "bestial." For deliberate cruelty and nature, "human" might be the greater insult. Isaac Asimov

Where does discipline end? Where does cruelty begin? Somewhere between these, thousands of children inhabit a voiceless hell. Francois Mauriac