• The poet Marty McConnell reciting this line at a reading: “Every bomber is a suicide bomber.”
  • How even if you got everyone on Earth to be courteous and generous, you’d still run into situations where others have to put some other person’s interests above yours, e.g. a private driver cutting you off to get their client to the airport in time, or a tour manager making your life hard as a hospitality person because they need to make sure their artist is happy. That could be a cause for pessimism, since it means that no matter how hard we try to get everyone to be nice to each other, there will still be moments of conflict. But it could also be a cause for optimism, since it means that in at least some of the cases where someone treated us like crap, they acted that way because they had a constructive obligation to someone else, not necessarily because they wanted to make your life worse. (You’re collateral damage, not the target—what everyone wants to hear.)
    • Of course, even if those conflicts are unavoidable, we can always try to navigate them in a better way. The driver can wave thank-you. The tour manager can be more polite.