enlightened.

It didn’t surprise me at all when Hari’s open contempt for Mitch turned from passive hostility into active agression.

Perhaps aggression is the wrong word, though my generation certainly grew up understanding that pranks, bullying and even joke-making at the expense of a targeted individual were a kind of aggression that so-called enlightened folks tended to turn their noses up at.

None of us could be called enlightened, though I sensed an inherent cruelty in Hari’s overly simplistic high jinks in a way I couldn’t articulate then and even struggle a bit with now. It was dumb-fuckery at it’s peak, and Mitch caught the blunt trauma to his person and his pride.

What I’m saying, I suppose, is that I’m not innocent in the events that followed out of those next few days between the four of us in shift 8B because I did nothing to stop it, but I’ve worked through a bit of personal absolution in the time since knowing that I was simply to dumb and weak to stop it even if I had known better.