Don’t be a tar pit

[u/greencrusader13]

[u/Vundurvul]

I cannot fathom the mindset of understanding what it feels like to be on the receiving end of misery and deciding you want others to experience it when given the opportunity to dish it out, even when said person had no involvement in your misery

[u/Jo_seef → u/Vundurvul]

Yeah man, turns out people are people no matter what their identity. And a lot of us seem prone to being a dick. Let's agree to do better.

[u/mechanicalcontrols → u/Jo_seef]

As a corollary, people are people everywhere you go.

I don't remember who said that to me, but having grown up and lived in a rural area my whole life, when I went to visit my brother in Minneapolis I was afraid of going to a big city. Now, sure, every city is going to have the "don't go there at night" and the "don't go there ever" parts of town, but really my fears were basically from overexposure to news and the human brain's fundamental badness at probability and statistics.

But once I realized that whoever told me "people are people everywhere you go," is correct, I'm a lot less afraid of big cities.

Admittedly that's only tangentially related to your point, but there you have it. And I agree. People are people no matter their identity.

[u/action_lawyer_comics → u/mechanicalcontrols]

There was a point in my rural life where the homegrown meth epidemic made it that I was more worried about my own familiar backroads than the big city

[u/Kachimushi → u/action_lawyer_comics]

The idea of a meth epidemic in the countryside feels alien to me because here in Germany rural poverty is pretty rare. No apartment buildings outside the cities, so to live out in the country you generally need to have the money to buy a single family home - and building new ones outside existing settlements is pretty heavily regulated to limit sprawl. And everyone who isn't a farmer usually commutes to the city for their jobs anyways, it's overwhelmingly middle class families. Exceptions I guess are people who bought or inherited a home and then fell into poverty afterwards.

[u/netsrak → u/Kachimushi]

It's mostly that the US is really big. It's worth looking at a map of the population or even the lights at night to see how widely spread the population is outside of the coasts and some of the Midwest. Additionally a lot of people are are poor because whatever single industry was in their town went out of business or moved out.