Broken People

You gotta be careful about spreading your empathy around.
Maybe.
I was sitting at a red light on my way to work watching a guy limp across the street. Moving slowly. Obviously beat down. Ragged. Not homeless. At least he didn't look homeless.
He had the look of a guy who had lost. I see this all the time. Too much. But I understand it.
Life is relentless. To be alive is to struggle. With money. With emotions. With self image. With other people. With scams and shams and lies and heartbreak.
Life is not easy and some people cannot handle it. Lots of people cannot handle it.
And they get broken. Barely subsisting, working small money jobs where bosses feel justified in condescension. Limping across cross walks with no apparent destination in mind.
I caught myself thinking "Well what if this guy is just a loser? What if he never even tried? Should I vibe out some empathy to someone like that?"
I don't think so. I guess that's where I have to draw the line. If you never take an honest swipe at life you get what you deserve.
I'm not talking about criminals. I can feel empathy for a failed criminal. Not violent criminals. I'm talking about people who rob banks or even better, corporations. People who sell pot and other harmless drugs (but not to children - that was made very clear in The Godfather). There is more dignity in non-violent crime than there is in relentless job interviewing.
The people who live off the system, scamming every handout they can lie their way into, since they came of age, they do not deserve my empathy. And there are lots of them out there.
In The Booze Emporium I see lots of ragged people. Dirty clothes, torn; twisted faces and liquid eyes, blank determined expressions. Faces that have fallen because of gravity and life's beat down so that things are not quite where they are supposed to be, pockmarked, scarred, swollen and red. They wear the mask of life outwardly; the rest of us hide it within.
They shuffle down the vodka aisle and shuffle back with two 1.75 liter bottles of Zhenka cradled in their arms. They are almost always polite. More so than some of the wine snobs.
I don't look down on these people. I empathize with them. Life has beaten them.
It comes down to a gut feel for me. When I wait on these people I get a vibe. You can tell the useless from the beaten. At least I think so.
Useless - no empathy. Beaten - all my empathy.
What about the guy in the crosswalk? And the many I see like him all the time who I will never speak to?
I guess I gotta cut him some slack. I'm going to assume life robbed and cheated him until he could take it no more.
My empathy is abundant because I am one of those phonies who acts as if I'm in control. Truth is I am one disturbance away from losing. I hang on by my fingernails every day. Psychologically battered, unable to swallow the rules of life. Somehow I live in a house (I refuse to say I own it - the goddamn Mortgage Vampire owns it). I have held respectable jobs all my life.
And yet my existence is psychedelic. Nothing makes sense and there is nothing to hold onto.
There are millions like me out there. One step from losing.
So it might be a good thing to spread some empathy around to those who have lost.

(Editor's note: I had no idea where I was going with this thing. I don't think I produced any kind of coherent argument for or against. I was just reacting to the strong emotion stirred up in me, sitting at a red light on my way to work, watching a ragged man limp across the street.)