What has she seen? Who has she lost? What is her future? What have we become?
Reciprocity ... In a society such as ours, it’s truly the most radical act you can do.
By Mark Taylor
DeMOCKracy.ink (7/7/25)
This post is mostly from a comment I made earlier today to a post by fellow Substacker Diana Van Eyk: What Are These Times Doing To Us?:
I had a firsthand experience with this the other day, Diana...
This did not happen in a big city. I live in a small town of just under 10,000. I was walking up the steps to my local Post Office to drop off some mail when I tripped and fell forward into the steps, landing pretty hard. I almost had the wind knocked out of me and I'm lucky I didn't break a wrist. The mail I had been carrying scattered across the steps.
Meanwhile, three or four people at the top of the stairs looked down on me and not ONE asked if I was okay, or offered to help me get up or retrieve the mail. There was not a single word or gesture of support, assistance or care.
Nothing.
Total silence.
Flustered and a bit embarrassed, I gathered up my envelopes and limped my way up the stairs into the Post Office and the people silently walked away. Luckily, other than a little bruising, I was okay.
The evaporating necessity of all decent communities
For some time -- going back at least eight years -- I have noticed the evaporating necessity of all decent communities: Reciprocity, the absolutely essential "thank you, you're welcome" daily interaction of a functioning community. Reciprocity is both the foundation of and a form of empathy.
There is an absence of the anient concept of “paying it forward”, in which care for others is seen as a cycle that returns to us all.
While few if any say a word of thanks when I hold a door open for them, where I have really noticed and felt the lack of reciprocity in our collapsing society is with the crisis of the US/Israel genocide in Gaza and now with the bullying, illegal roundup of immigrants.
Such systemic brutality happens daily now, out in the open and as a clear strategy of social numbing, intimidation and control. While there are protests, the vast majority of people -- sheeple -- really don't care. They lack empathy and can't even begin to grasp the fact that if such government brutality can happen to others it can, and likely will at some point, happen to them or someone they care about. And when it does, they will be on the receiving end of the same callous indifference they had toward other abused people.
Truly, Donald Trump is not the problem, he is the logical product.
I have kept the short video below up on my screen for almost a week and am drawn to watch it several times a day. Like you, I have seen a lot of documentation of the callous brutality of the US/Israeli genocide, but this short video of the trauma this innocent young child is suffering rattles me and brings tears to my eyes every time I view it. Her stained shirt with the bunny rabbit art is just like shirts I see on little kids every day in my community. The contrast of the birds chirping in the background resonates in a way I can’t even describe.
What has she seen?
Who has she lost?
What is her future?
Is she still alive today?
What have we become....
Watch her eyes as she tentatively take’s the man’s hand and the repetitive self-soothing tapping of her ear lobe slows…then stops. What does she remember as she looks off to her right.
Reciprocity is essential to and an expression of a decent society. It is the most essential of our abused and dwindling natural resources. Without it we are all lost.
Practice it.
Model it.
Teach it to the children.
In a time like this and in a society such as ours, it’s truly the most radical act you can do.
Hi Mark,
Thanks for this response to my post. I'm so sorry you had that experience at the post office. Indifference to our suffering hurts.
And you've actually helped me to feel grateful for living in a caring community. Here, people would have expressed concern, and helped you pick up your mail.
And that little girl. I wonder the same things. I'm just grateful that someone reached out to her and took her hand. I hope she's safe now.
These times are just heart wrenching.
Beautiful, Mark! I am thinking about the countless dead children under the rubble in Gaza when I hear my friend talking about driving his kids to fun at summer camp. "Attention is a moral act. What we attend to and how we attend to the world says exactly who we are.
Most of us in Western modernity aint much and modernity is not worth saving. For those of us who attend well and feel sickened the best we can do is hospice modernity, carefully work in the ruins in hopes and preparation for a better civilization to come which we living now will never see." I'm quoting myself from the book I am writing.