Nobody Deserves to be Treated That Way

When I was a teen, I was filled with righteous anger all the time. I was an activist on all fronts, I was an advocate for the rights of those who could not, or would not speak up for themselves. There were so many things that were unfair, unjust, and just plain wrong, and.... you guessed it, I was going to change all that, I was going to make a difference.
To tell you the truth, it was just plain exhausting. I was so emotionally spent all the time, which is probably why life trains you to eventually not give much of a crap. You don't have many chances to change much of anything. You can point out references to Mother Teresa, Ghandi, Rosa Parks, or Oskar Schindler... all those people were just one person.

Ok, point taken, but I was just an upper middle class white girl from Southern California, and although I set off trying to change the world, all I ended up doing was smoking pot in the park listening to some a-hole play Stairway on acoustic.

Yes, I photoshopped myself into a picture with stoners in the park.

So with that attitude, I walked into photoshop. Now, I didn't take photography, I worked on the school paper, but all journalism students were required to take a photo lab, so here I was.
Well, school had just started, and along with that, none of the 40 some people in the class were people I knew. I sat by a couple of girls and eventually there was decent conversation.
A little while passed, and another girl came in late and plopped her stuff down, leaving it there to give a note to the teacher, who was dozing quietly behind his desk. The girls I was sitting by started giggling behind their hands and saying some nasty things about the girl who just entered.

I scowled. I hemmed and hawed, I've since forgotten what I said, but the girls huffed off... in that special way bitchy teenagers do, leaving me sitting next to where the other girl came back to sit.
We started talking and became good friends. Turns out those other girls were right, my friend is a total heinous bitch. But that's part of her charm. We lived together for a minute after high school, and she's still on my Facebook.
I never told her what those girls said, nor did I tell her the only reason we ended up sitting together that day was because of what I had said in response. That's not really what all this doing good stuff is about.
But I dunno, maybe she would be less of a bitch to me if she knew. No way, that's just wishful thinking, if Jesus came down out of the clouds right now, to land in front of her, she would say, "What the hell took you so damn long?? You could have called first, I would have set an extra place for dinner. But noooo, frickin' mysteries of God and all that. Stupid men, Son of God or not, you're all the same."

Maybe I should have stayed sitting next to the mean girls.