On tolerance

She looked emaciated and tired. And she looked at me with suspicious eyes.

I didn’t belong there. My two o’clock shadow and decidedly masculine voice should have stopped me at the back door.

She walked around me, making sure to keep a good distance between us, and asked an employee for the key to the medicine cabinet.

“I need my daughter’s Ritalin,” she explained, but not to me.

There are few places where a man is do decidedly out of place than a battered woman’s shelter.

I was there to interview a pretty blonde woman about her experience as a domestic violence counselor. She had sat beside a domestic violence victim in this past weekend’s trial. Less than 24 hours after the verdict, one of the counselor’s former clients was murdered by her boyfriend. The cycle started again.

I’ve been in two independent conversations today about my level of tolerance for stupidity. I have a high tolerance. It takes a lot to send me over the edge.

However, my level of tolerance is much lower when it comes to evil. There is no place in this writer’s mind for anyone hitting a woman, child, or elderly person. I can understand a lot of criminals and their activities. I cannot appreciate someone who attacks something more vulnerable than themselves…no matter whether it is an animal or a human being.

I was in the shelter for only 45 minutes. Most of that time I was in closed room. When I emerged, the emaciated woman and her daughter were gone. I don’t know if they were hiding from me or if they had gone back out into the world.

Either way…it is sad.