Living on edge

Last week I dared to walk my dog in a neighborhood of Manhattan that is not my own. I doubled the blunder by using the country-walk leash instead of the city version. The country-walk leash allows my mini-Schnauzer Aengus to roam deep into the brush to sniff and do his business. The city-walk leash keeps him close by my side and allows me full control when he decides to lunge for a loitering pigeon. It also disentangles easily from the inevitable encounters with other city dogs.

As Aengus and I walked from a dog-run near Gramercy Park, Aengus stopped to sniff a sassy little Maltese. Its owner, a well-dressed man, stopped to facilitate the encounter. Suddenly Aengus pulled and snapped the locking mechanism on his country-style tether, leaving me without control and the Maltese at risk. The owner swooped up his pooch as Aengus snarled and I quickly regained control. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I was trying to pull him away...” “Well, you’re not doing a very good (expletive deleted) job!” the owner replied before I could finish. “I’m sorry,” I repeated, pulling Aengus away down the street.

From the other side of the iron-fenced park I heard the Maltese’s owner still ranting at me, apparently unimpressed by my forthright apology. I am fortunate to be losing my hearing—the better to ignore insults—so I moved closer to the fence. “Beg pardon?” I said. “You shouldn’t be using that leash in the city,” my mentor offered. “I know, I’m sorry,” I reiterated, wanting to blame my husband for bringing the wrong leash but refraining. The man would not accept my third and final apology and we parted equally unfulfilled by our encounter.

I wanted to cry. I wanted to kick the dog. I wanted to kick the man. Instead I sulked. I forgot all about the nice time we had at the dog run. I sulked about the man and his Maltese and my declined apology. What hope is there, I thought, for peace in our world if two well-heeled New Yorkers can’t survive an encounter between pedigreed pooches without swearing oaths and entertaining violent fantasies?

This week we find out to what level of violence we will escalate in Afghanistan to get the Muslim world to like us. I think we’re all on edge about it. We know we’re going broke fighting these wars and bailing out the too-big-to-fails and it’s making us nasty. We haven’t just lost our sense of humor. We’re angry at the world, and we want everyone to know it.

The rancor in our daily debates scares me. Even among like-minded people, seemingly minor disputes can derail a friendship or disrupt business dealings. Then there are the folks who go over the top and gun down fellow citizens.

When the war in Iraq was announced by the former chief executive, my protest was accompanied by a deep fear of this kind of response in our society. I remember the street crime of the ‘70s in cities across the country during the Vietnam War. My theory is that when a nation is at war, everyone in that nation is at war on a personal level.

But this new troop surge in Afghanistan should come as no surprise to anyone. We had no peace candidate in 2008. Our current President vowed to end the war in Iraq but never said he would aver conflict elsewhere in the world.

It is up to us individually to end the personal wars we engage in and to tone down our rhetoric in public and private. Making apologies and accepting them is more important now than ever. A new generation is growing up around us who never knew a decade of peace. If we don’t show them how it’s done, they may not ever see one.

- Cass Collins