The Kindness of Giving the Benefit of the Doubt

I ride the train as part of my commute each day. One day this week I got on and managed to snag a seat while a lot of people had to stand in the aisle as seats filled up. A teen girl, maybe around 13, tried to go past a couple women standing just up from me. I only realized that she was trying to go past them when I heard one of the women loudly commenting something along the lines of, “Are you trying to go past? You should say ‘excuse me’ then. I swear, kids these days. No manners.” This woman and her friend continued verbally blasting this girl after she went past them. A few minutes later the girl came back past the women. When she got just past me, I heard her speaking in another language to a man. My impression from this encounter was that the girl just didn’t speak English and hadn’t known what to say and certainly how to respond to these women. A coworker was sitting a couple rows up and had observed the encounter from earlier on. When we discussed the encounter later, he was able to tell me that actually the girl had said, “Excuse me, I need to get by,” but the women were talking so loudly to themselves that they hadn’t heard her.

This encounter bothered me.

1) Grown women chose to take out a perceived slight against a much more vulnerable girl. The encounter was very much like a bullying encounter rather than what could have been a conducive interaction if they had actually wanted to alert the girl of a more effective and polite way of engaging with them.

2) This was entirely a perceived slight. The girl had tried to be polite. Rather than give the girl the benefit of the doubt in any way (maybe she had said something and they didn’t hear, maybe she couldn’t speak the language, maybe she couldn’t speak at all, maybe there were mental issues preventing her from engaging in a normal social manner), the women just attacked.

3) I am very glad that the girl didn’t respond negatively towards the women when they attacked her, but what kind of taste does this leave in her mouth? These women just indicated to her that it’s okay to be verbally abusive towards others. Their behavior was far from the social politeness that they were theoretically attempting to enforce. What kind of effect may this behavior have on the girl when she’s older, in a similar situation, or otherwise? Kids who see violent behavior at home may be more likely to be violent in school. We naturally mimic behaviors we observe, and the behavior of this women was repulsive.

I don’t believe that these women had the right to be as rude and assuming as they were. I hope that we can give people, especially children, the benefit of the doubt that slights aren’t intended as slights, that rudeness may simply be ignorance, and all of these “errors” can be met with kindness and gentle correction as needed. Kindness. Kindness. Kindness. I cling to that especially of late.