"Being kind is free."
I don't fully agree. It's not free. Sometimes it costs you money. Sometimes your time. Sometimes whatever energy you've got left in the day.
So no, not free. But fine, I'm splitting hairs.
Then there's the other saying. "No good deed goes unpunished." The good you do for someone might come back and bite you.
Whatever. Free or not, bites back or not, none of that is really what's bothering me.
What I don't get is the entitlement. People talk down to waiters. To beggars. To anyone who isn't at their level. I was on a bus recently and saw someone jerk their shoulder away, hard, because a stranger's head had drifted onto it while sleeping. Waking someone up gently, sure, fine. This wasn't that. I saw people refuse an inch of space to someone with a bigger body. People sitting like kings, looking down at whoever was standing.
Too many bus examples, I know. I just got off one.
But this is the same entitlement, just smaller. The one behind slavery. Caste. Class. Race. Gender. Whatever shape it's taken, wherever, whenever.
Nobody builds a system like that overnight. It's built one small moment at a time. Someone deciding another person doesn't matter as much as they do.
That's about it.