I need to be treated gently and kindly.

A friend who had cancer gets treated with kid gloves; my mom, always the ‘sensitive’ one, got the same treatment, and still expects it at the age of 74.

I expect the same.

But I don’t call it ‘kid gloves’; I call it ‘normal’.

Let’s see, what’s the opposite of ‘gently and kindly’ – ‘harshly and cruelly’, perhaps?

So, how did ‘harsh and cruel’ get to be the ‘norm’, the standard for human behavior?

And how did the desire for kindness and to be treated gently get to be considered some kind of weakness, an aberration, possibly even an abnormality? Something to be reserved for children, old people and invalids – the ‘weak’, in other words.

Warrior mentality has poisoned this culture, and many others.

Warrior of the spirit is good, as in, fighting for what is right, and true, and good.

But warrior *against* the spirit? the soul? This seems to me the essence of – Calvinism? Puritanism? and other harsh and critical ways of thinking.

I wish to see the world as a place that feels *safe*, not the ‘jungle’ that my father always said it was.

We’ve killed off most of the truly nasty beasties, or put them in zoos, as relics of a harsher past.

Maybe if we hadn’t, we’d be kinder to each other? Because then we’d really *know* what *true* danger was, instead of this concocted, play-fighting, ‘fantasy’ danger that so-called ‘heroes’ fight against in movies and stories.

Maybe having a *real* danger, outside ourselves, to fight against, would help us see how precious our connections with other humans are, and we might begin to treat those connections accordingly?