a world turning ugly

a teenager was very, very rude to her mother yesterday. i happened to be sitting right there, plum in between the two.

at any moment things could have turned ugly with me lashing out in a perfectly arched backhand at said rude teenager. not that it was my place to be hitting out at what i considered highly inappropriate and mind-numbingly dsturbing behaviour. but still you know. one feels like it.

in retrospect, the delinquent wasn't even entirely to blame. the mother had put in years and years of seriously spoiling rotten her offspring into a lazy, irresponsible, prejudiced, demanding and, ultimately, pretty non-likeable sort of a person. add a mistimed [though reasonable] question from the mother figure, and you see spwarks. instant conflagration. mins, conflict. rude back-and-forths. unberlievable audacity.

why i found all of this profoundly disturbing was because i was 'putting myself in the other person's shoes'. you see, i have been through adoloscence myself. it wasn't pretty for my mama, but i can tell you this. i wouldn't have got through a fraction of what went on in the above-mentioned episode without finding myself thrown out on my bottom all alone in the cold dark streets, cut off from my parents' estate and cetera. no, i'll take it one step further. i don't think it at all likely that i could have even dreamed up the balls to insult my parents in a manner close to what i witnessed. very spine-chilling.

even more spine-chilling... within a quarter of an hour after this friendly banter between the two had concluded, the mother meekly extended the olive branch to the apple of her eye..

just so that there would be no hard feelings in the perfect mom-daughter bonding movie-picture.
you know, the rose-hued one. with the soft OST and pink bubbles? yes, that one.
*gag*.

so, yesterday for a good bit i was thinking that the world had turned ugh-ly.