David McElroy

Karen Klein is a bus monitor on a school bus in suburban Rochester, N.Y., but she probably feels more like a Christian who’s been thrown to the lions — because the kids she deals with are vile, filthy-mouthed and just plain mean.

On Monday, one of the middle school kids who rides the bus recorded video of various students taunting Klein and making fun of her weight, her clothes and her purse, among other things. It’s disgusting to watch, but you can see it below. Even after it’s obvious that she’s crying, they continue to taunt her.

One of the most heart-breaking parts is when a student says she doesn’t have a family, because they all committed suicide so they wouldn’t have to be around her. Klein’s oldest son did commit suicide 10 years ago, so she said this was the most hurtful thing the kids said to her. We have no idea whether they knew about her son’s suicide.

If this is where the story ended, I’m not sure I’d even be sharing it with you. When I first saw the video on Wednesday, I thought it was too depressing to write about. But then someone took it upon himself to help Klein — and the results have been amazing.

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Most people have no idea what they stand for, but they know very clearly who and what they hate. That makes me very uneasy, because I feel it from people of every political position — and this isn’t the way things ought to be.

When George W. Bush was president, most Democrats hated him far more than they liked any Democrat who might take his place. Since Barack Obama has been president, most Republicans hate him with a passion, but only a tiny percentage of them actually like Mitt Romney, who won the GOP contest to be their standard-bearer. Why is this?

I think part of it is a modern form of tribalism. We like to think of ourselves as past such crude ways of acting, but that’s wishful thinking. If you arbitrarily divide people into a Purple Party and a Yellow Party, both groups will soon develop all sorts of “reasons” why their sides is wonderful and the other is evil and wrong. (And they’ll each declare that their reasons are rational.)

Beyond that, though, I suspect there’s another very important reason. It’s simply easier to feel and express hate than it is to articulate something good and find the character to stand for that instead of the hate.

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I would have sworn that Jack and Martha were newlyweds if they hadn’t been quite a bit on the older side. When they first came into the fast food restaurant where I was having dinner Monday night, they seemed like a young couple in love. I couldn’t help but smile when I saw them sit at a booth together — side by side instead of across from one another. What I didn’t know then is that they were newlyweds. They just got married Monday.

Jack fell in love with Martha more than 50 years ago, but he was too timid to approach the girl he said was the prettiest in the school. Besides, Martha always had plenty of dates, so he didn’t think she could possibly be interested in a skinny boy with little confidence and no apparent future. That was in the early ’60s at a high school near Birmingham. Neither knew that they would end up together in 2012.

Jack graduated from high school two years ahead of Martha and headed off to college. He kept a picture of Martha that he had gotten from one of her friends. Unknown to him at the time, Martha had wanted Jack to ask her out, but he had never shown any interest.

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