Humanity and its Peculiarities

I used to have bad dreams all the time when I was pregnant with my daughter. Bad graphic nightmares in which neither of us usually survived, and stuff like that. Every night. With my son, I dreamt a lot about Bruno Mars and sex. Never were the two in the same dream, though. This pregnancy has brought me pretty much no dreams whatsoever. So imagine my surprise, as I nodded off while my son "read" me a book, to see some guy running up to my car window with a gun shouting about how I cut him off, how I'm always cutting him off; and then he killed me. I was somehow at the court proceedings later. Didn't seem to be in spirit. And the guy saw that I was pregnant and he started to cry and said, "I'm sorry, I never would have killed her if I'd known she was pregnant! My wife's pregnant too! I'd never do that to a woman!"

This dream presents a remarkable lesson in kindness. I'm not the ideal person to present it, but I'm working on that, and the lesson is this: No one knows what anyone is going through, so we should chill the fuck out and be considerate, not maniacs. Simple. I remember when I found out I was miscarrying my second child, the drive home was excruciating. To the best of my knowledge, I wasn't doing anything stupid or reckless - I had my two and a half year old daughter in the backseat, after all. But during that numb, dreary drive I was harassed by no less than three West coast road ragers and collectively those incidents turned out to be one of the stupidest experiences with humanity I've ever had. Had they known what I was going through, would they have been more likely to excuse my perceived driving infractions? Actually, probably not. It was Vegas. Vegas = self-centered douchebags all around. But in friendlier parts of the world? Maybe.

The dream can also be applied to our current racial climate. The man killed me because he felt I was in his way. Or because I wasn't driving like him. He didn't stop to think about how I'm human too, regardless; and that we had something in common despite our different practices and points of view on driving.

Or, there's the feminist angle too: Women are seen as disposable; our only use is for having babies.