I was running the other day in the streets of a small city in Maine. I saw a group of three 20-30 year-olds walking on the sidewalk so, instead of trying to squeeze by them, I ran in the street to pass them. Suddenly, before I realized it, they were screaming obscenities at me like "You fat bitch" "Go to hell" "Yeah, keep running". My first reaction was to look back and yell, "well, look who's running, idiots", but I held back. I kept running, angry about the whole situation for the rest of my run. Why would people lash out at a random stranger? Not just a random stranger, actually-a stranger who was trying to be NICE to them?

One suspicion I had was that they could tell that I was a college student. They were frustrated with the economic and social class difference between me and them and they decided to take it out on me.

Another possible factor that made them so bitter was the anonymity of the situation. Just like another car in a line of traffic, it is ok to hold your horn down in frustration. It's not like you will ever see the person who you're beeping at ever again. If the car in front of you isn't solving the problem, then they are part of the problem.

In reality, I feel as if this problem is one of the key problems in our world. The only people who we are willing to be nice to in this world is people that we can understand and connect to and understand. Anybody else, whether they are strangers on the street or people across the world suffering, are too disassociated from our lives to deserve our respect and love.

If you can not associate with hunger and poverty, then it would be just as impossible to say "I want to feed people going hungry" or "I want to donate to those less fortunate than I" as "I want to put a large rock at the bottom of the ocean". Random examples aside, we cannot be motivated to do something that we cannot associate with.

Instead, we should try to find similarities in things that seem utterly foreign to us. Instead of hating utter strangers who see life differently, we must see the humanity in us all. This is what connects us and what allows every single person to be connected.

Most everyone has a hatred and an aversion towards strangers. I spent 14 years of my life avoiding conversation with strangers just because that is what I was taught. It is socially acceptable to not love and not respect people who don't know you. And, as soon as you don't love and don't respect strangers, they don't love nor respect you either.

It is as if all of humanity is a large, hollow sphere. The atoms of the sphere are human lives and empty space is hatred. We love those close to us, our neighbors next to us on the sphere, however we pool our hatred for those distanced from us. We pool this space in the middle of the sphere, so that there is a large space between us and the other side of the sphere. As the other side looks in towards us, all they can see is the vast space of bitterness and hatred between us and them.

We need to stop feeling as if people all around us aren't people, just like us. We need to understand that it is ok to talk to, ok to respect, and ok to love perfect strangers. Instead of hurling obscenities at people running past you, look them in the eye and smile. If they don't smile back, don't feel anger towards them, just know that the more hatred and anger you absorb without repercussion, the less hatred and anger there will be in the world.