The Voice of the Thinking Man - February 26, 2025

Who puts down the little bar at the grocery store? You know the one I’m talking about, that plastic divisor ensconced with meaning. The little guy you plop on the conveyor belts that signals to the cashier which one of us hungry little hippos wants to buy and eat these voluminous mountains of vittles aplenty? Certainly, the cashier shouldn’t have to slap the bar down. If anything, they already do too much. Should they also bag my groceries, carry them to my car? Should they send me away with a peck on the cheek and a little walking around money? Maybe they could leave the porch light on for me too, so when I slink back home, distraught and empty handed from my late night search for meaning at a Dave and Buster’s, I know there’s someone who loves me, waiting up to know that I’m safe. No Paul, not for minimum wage. Just scan me through and take my money and forget me as I waddle away.

I’m still stuck - should I divide my groceries from an oncoming contributor to the conveyor belt? Or, should I expect this new consummate consumer to demarcate their territory on the belt from mine? It’s important to note here Paul that in public these things must go unspoken. Can you imagine actually asking another human to use the divider? I feel sick even thinking about it. This is Minnesota after all, where anything socially essential cannot be spoken aloud. I could be on fire from tip to tail and the best I could do in public is muster up a polite “ope” if someone is standing between me and the only bucket of water in the world. I’ll hope they can scry the subtleties of the moment without me peeping word as I sizzle in silent panic. And how could I expect them to know what I need? If they look back and behold my porcine body engulfed in flames, what would they think? For all they know I am actualizing as a fresh slab of fatback.

So perhaps the answer to who places the bar is simple: you place the bar. But now we’ve reached a mesa of righteousness on the mountain of understanding and see there is higher yet to climb. When do we place the bar, and where?

I do not wish to be cruel, but can you imagine the cruelty this kindness might inflict? Imagine you walk up to the checkout lane and the person in front of you puts the bar down before you even get a chance. Do they think you’re some kind of a clown? Some kind of doritoed sycophant about to empty a basket of chaos into their reality? And what about the other way. What if I haphazardly amble my way up to an occupied line and without a single thought, slip the bar in between someone else’s blackberries and my own deluge of barbecue flavored everything I could find. I wouldn’t even give them a chance to be kind, perhaps shattering their one opportunity in their day to put any kind of good into the world. My own rushed selfishness extinguishes the light of good and I push us one step closer to a culture of cruelty. 

I refuse to harm another with obvious but ill-timed generosity. Perhaps then the kindnesses we extend to others should be thankless and invisible. Every action, a silent note to the tune of a better tomorrow, and without them we succumb to the cacophony of now. 

Reactionary and overt kindness is the cudgel of the weak, preparatory kindness instead is still a cudgel but for the strong. I believe, without a shadow of a doubt, that it is right and good to place the bar behind your own groceries as soon as you are finished unloading them from your basket whether or not there is someone in line behind you. And, should no one have arrived by the time your last item is scanned, place it back where it came from.

Thus speaks the voice of the thinking man.