Justified: Quick to Judge

So imagine the scenario: You've left work 45 minutes ago. The sun is toasting your car. Your socks are dripping with sweat. You've been in bumper to bumper, Chicago traffic for miles. You're still not even halfway home. Your schedule is being shifted. And above all, there is nothing you can do. Then, just as you're ready to punch through your airbag, you see a 1992 rusted Chevy Corsica flying down the shoulder going 45mph. The sun now has nothing on your heat. You nearly steam the windows you're so fired up. All you can think of is every sinful insult you've heard in your life. Every putrid put down. Every offensive onslaught. And you curse the Corsica for life, banish the driver to eternal damnation, and hope that they get caught between on-ramps, impaled into an overpass. That's the only possible solution for someone with such careless disregard for the rest of the dying public, the creeping masses.

But what if the driver of that car is on his way to the hospital where his wife has passed out while giving birth. a.) Traffic laws no longer apply; b.) He is not intentionally giving you the proverbial middle finger; c.) Are you really in a position to judge whether or not his actions are justified? There is only one thing in the world that matters to him, and nothing will stop him from getting to his family, regardless of the consequences, which, I must say, hardly include the scowls from the cars he his passing. It's his life to live. It's his head that must come to a rest at night. You were ready to throw down the shackles of death, but at the end of the day, you just don't know.

This is one, relatively drastic situation, but consider how many times you pass negative judgment on someone based on a minuscule act of inconsequential importance. It happens constantly and consistently throughout the course of every hour of every day. It's impossible to ignore. I'm in no way a saint when it comes to this. I throw out the back handed slaps to the face as often as Rick Flair. Or at least I used to. And I'm writing this now to try to change that mindset.

Like I said, at the end of the day, you just don't know. In the same way that everyone's tolerance of pain is different, and not all people may perceive the outside world in the same light, every person has a different threshold of what will cause them to act in a way that goes against your grain. There is no standard. There is no base line to follow. There are certain situations that will cause me to react in a volatile, hostile, and really damn aggressive manner. It doesn't happen very often, but they are out there, those situations. And I promise you, you do not want to be around when that time comes. Besides me, think of how many times you see an unfortunate, uncomfortable, inopportune situation, that in some way, negatively impacts your life, and your first reaction is to assign them some life fault. But, you just never know.

HEY, HEY, CHRIS!!!! But what if that speeding Corsica was just another asshole in the eternally long line of assholes walking this earth? Then so be it. But what's the harm in cutting him some slack? If you judge them as damnable, then all it does it make you more mad and peg a possibly innocent person (that you'll probably never meet) as a leper, an outcast, a social deviant. But if you think, 'wow, bet he has an emergency to get to, am I ever glad I'm not in his shoes,' well, then, it goes away. Last night, it took an extra 20 minutes to get home from work because there was a four-car accident on the expressway. Instead of my first thought being, 'thanks ya'll, now I'm late to dinner,' I forced myself to think, 'well being that person would have really put a wrench in my plans for the night.'

This this kinda bleeds into the theory of there's someone else out there that has it worse, so appreciate where you are. If you just take the time to step back and assign a justification to whatever crazed situation you are witness to, you might find the world isn't filled with bastard coated bastards with bastard filling, maybe they just need to catch a break from the person riding on their high horse. So step off your judge's platform and put down the gavel, who knows, someone might cut you some slack when things don't go according to plan.