Once when I still lived in Vancouver, Canada, I was walking down the sidewalk on Burrard, in the financial district where I worked at the time, with my friend Betty. It was a really wide sidewalk, and I guess without realizing it, we were walking in the middle of it, side by side. There was still lots of room on either side of us for people to walk. But all of a sudden, a random man started screaming at us for carelessly walking down the middle of the sidewalk. We’d been having a lowkey and pleasant evening, so this was incredibly weird and jarring.
I need to point out that this wasn’t someone living on the street or someone who seemed to be having a mental health episode — just some regular, relatively well dressed, normal looking middle aged white guy, who happened to be very angry. Neither one of us is (I don’t think) a particularly confrontational or conflict-prone person, and if this guy had simply pointed out that we were walking down the middle of the sidewalk, potentially forcing other pedestrians to the edges of it, I’m sure we would have apologized and moved more to one side. But he didn’t.
The event was so shocking that I told my friend Will about it, laughingly, the next day. I didn’t understand why this man had been so irate with us, two people he didn’t know, over an offense so seemingly miniscule as to be basically nonexistent. “That’s easy,”…
