Recognizing the Slave

I had an odd encounter this evening, in person, with a spokesperson for a major demonic force in corporate America -- let the name of the big entity go unspoken for now. And while at first I saw only the flat deadness in the eyes of this spokesperson (so much like the eyes of a bigoted policeman I once had the fortune to meet off a highway in Whittier, California) while this customer service manager spoke his party line, I did some internal jiujiutsu, the conversation turned, there came into my proxy's gaze the merest flicker of humanity, and lo and behold! -- the clouds parted enough to let me see the slave that lived in his eyes, helpless, almost forced into American glossolalia, speaking its American code, and then the glossolalia passed and we started to have something that almost resembled real conversation.

Being able to recognize the slave in another's eyes: a gift capable of unlatching whatever keeps all our thousands of tiny inner slaves unnoticed.