THE CITY IS AN ABUSER
Living in a big city in today's "civilization" entails an almost constant daily extreme assault on one's senses. Everyone is getting in everyones' way. It's a nerve-wracking exposure to gross and crude materialism. Plus just about everyone you meet glances you suspiciously as if you could possibly murder them. But then you find yourself being equally nervous of " strangers" for the same reason. There always seems to be the presence of another human being you've never met, right behind you.
As Peter Hamill once sung;
" The stranger the common man, the stranger the common man;
the stranger the common man, the stranger the common man."
Yet living in the countryside can be worse. Should you desire a degree of privacy neigbours spread vicious exponential gossip that ends up where everyone in the village believes you are a serial child abuser, or something equally nasty. What they don't know about you they make up. Yet if you tell them all there is to know they have a field day. A film editor becomes an overnight purveyor of pornographic DVDs village sensation.
So. Physical or psychological abuse ~take your pick.
Ahh, the human condition.
MSM