Whinging and complaining in the name of journalism

Every day I catch the train to and from work. Every day on the way home (should I actually manage to leave at a reasonable time..!) there is a free paper that anyone can pick up call the MX. After trawling through the regurgitated news that I have managed to keep abreast of throughout the day, and deliberately avoiding the random celebrity sections, there, either side of the sport section (which is also avoided, except for, when relevant, the Tour de France) is a page where people can write in and have their little 9 seconds of fame.

To scoot to what I'm actually intending to talk about, is the section "Vent your spleen". And vent, is what the people do. Why is that people feel like they need to complain about every single little thing that could potentially vex them? They complain about someone hitting them with their bag, someone standing on their shoe, someone's breathing habits and anything else that catches their fancy. What I would like to know, is that if they feel like they have been polite in their restraint, why is their restraint not complete? Why do they still feel like they have to vent?! It either only serves to be ignored by those who don't realise what they're doing, or make those self-conscious about their behaviour paranoid! I did read a comment someone had put in one day along this line... Simply that so many people complained about so many different things that nobody felt they could do anything without being scrutinised.

This is my proposal: That people should be more understanding of those around them. That people should not feel as though it is their right to dress someone else down for something that irritates them. That if everyone preferred everyone else about themselves, there would be nothing to submit to the paper.

And then I woke up. And realised I was dreaming.