A couple of weeks ago, I was riding home on BART. The train wasn’t that crowded but I decided to stand near the door rather than risk sitting next to someone with a relaxed sense of personal hygiene. When we stopped at Civic Center station, I woman got on pushing a stroller by me.

I looked down and expected to see an infant or toddler. Instead, what looked up at me was some sort of retarded midget, old enough to have smile lines. This person grinned a mindless little grin, expressing a sentiment of “Hi, what’s your name?” or possibly “I like to go to the pet store and eat mice.”

I never found out which. Like most cowards presented with an uncomfortable bit of reality, I looked away and pretended he wasn’t there.

One of the worst aspects of human nature is our tendency to distance ourselves from the misfortune of others. More often than not, it’s completely unnecessary. That guy in the stroller was dealt a lousy hand but I’m pretty sure that whatever ails him isn’t catching. Yet, we will spare no ugliness in convincing ourselves that catastrophic bad luck could never happen to us.

Some take the morally righteous tack and may react to the stroller guy something like “Only fornication could produce such a vile offspring. They have disobeyed God’s law. Behold the homonculus, proof positive that contempt breeds a familiar.”

OK, most people aren’t that harsh, at least not out loud.

I usually deal with the situation by thinking up something comically grotesque. My coping mechanism in this instance was “To fight terrorism, we’re going to need a lot of these mutants. Imagine a phalanx of them, drooling, gibbering, and armed with meat cleavers. Charge the enemy with that kind of fighting force and we’ll convert every one of those rat bastards to Christianity (after they’ve finished pissing themselves with fear, that is). Praise Jesus!”

I can be a real shit sometimes.