Why are People Nasty?

A few years ago I was harboring suspicions that I had unwanted guests. There were some signs that I might have mice in the house. I saw nothing that convinced me that there were mice, but a suspicion never the less.

Then one day I walked into my kitchen and spotted the rear end of a mouse disappearing into the burner of my stove. I couldn’t deny it any longer and I had to take action. Following some advice from a specialist, I went and bought some mouse traps. I know I should have worked that out for myself, but I didn’t.

I carefully placed several traps baited with peanut butter in the kitchen and waited. Then waited some more. After a few days I was starting to wonder if I had dreamt the sight of the mouse I saw. The next day however, I was able to send out the following announcement to my friends.

Fast on the heels of other great personalities came the announcement of the death of Beauregard the Mouse. He died suddenly early Friday morning while eating some peanut butter. Evidence at the scene indicated that foul play may have played a part in his death. Police have not been notified. Authorities are currently seeking any surviving relatives. Beauregard will be disposed of later today.

I was glad to be rid of the mouse. It hadn’t occurred to me that there might be more than one, but I left the traps out anyway, just in case. The next morning I found another mouse in a trap. I decided to call him Eugene, in the hopes that he was Beauregard's gay lover. All the same I got more mouse traps.

Not long after I caught a third mouse. I didn’t give this one a name. I reset the traps. I was troubled now, because I didn’t know now how many mice I had. I was down in my basement office working on some e-mail when I happened to turn and notice a small mouse sitting in the corner of the room looking at me. I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of the mice being in the basement before.

I laid more traps in the basement. I ended up catching about 15 mice altogether over the next few weeks. There have been none since, so I think I am free.

One mouse sticks in my mind. I was working on my computer in the basement office when I heard a trap go off. I turned and looked to see a small mouse lay dead. I was in the middle of something, so I decided to finish that first. I kept glancing over at the mouse. I kept imagining that the mouse was still moving.

Finally I decided to have a better look at the mouse. I realized that there were two mice, the dead one in the trap and its sibling. The sibling had crawled over its brother (or sister I didn’t check) to eat the peanut butter remaining on the trap.

This act caused me to see the mouse in a different light. The mice must have been living a desperate existence in my home. Food was scarce and they were likely hungry all the time. Crawling over a dead brother was a small price to pay for a few morsels of food.

This sudden empathy for the mouse didn’t stop me from resetting the trap, but it did get me reflecting on how circumstances affect the way people behave. Now, I know that mice are not like people, but their behaviour does give insights.

All of us have had to deal with people who are nasty to us. It is easy to just assume that they are just “nasty people”. And there are some real “nasty people” in this world. But much more often it is circumstances can cause people to act nasty.

There are many circumstances that can cause this nastiness, but they all involve people not having something they want. Like the mouse after the peanut butter, their desires make them lose sight of the others around them.

We can criticise people for allowing their weakness to give way to nastiness, but all of us from time to time may find ourselves in the same position.

The more important question for us is what we do about nasty behaviour. Nastiness is not something that we should accept, neither in others nor in ourselves.

Sometimes, if the nasty person is some one we care about, helping them get what they want is what we should do. Sadly though, most of the time we should just let it go. Not that we should openly reject the nastiness, for that runs the risk of us becoming nasty. Rather, we just ignore it and move on, leaving the nastiness in the past.