That is how it always works.

A powerful person makes cruelty toward a chosen target into the room’s shared entertainment, and then good people participate in atrocity while feeling only that they are being good sports.

I have not fully forgiven those four hundred people.

But I have stopped being surprised by them, because I understand, now, that they are not monsters.

They are just ordinary people who never once stopped to check whether the thing everyone was laughing at was a person.

And that lesson — that most cruelty is committed not by monsters but by pleasant people who declined to check — has changed how I move through every room I have entered since.