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I've read Dr. Gazebo's story before. While it has a heartwarming ring to it, I doubt whether a little compassion would do much for the subway guy or his family. I've been in similar situations where I witnessed a man being abusive to his kid, or his wife, or a mother barely restraining herself from beating her kid on a bus. Let's get real here. These people are sad, twisted, and they are willing to put those who are relatively helpless within their sphere of influence through a life of hellish torment because it gives them some kind of minor thrill or feeling of power... the spouses and children of these people are basically just horribly unlucky: royally screwed. When I've seen it, I've had fleeting fantasies of threatening, humiliating, or beating the crap out of the offender, but it's just movie stuff. You know that the end result of such a confrontation would just be them going home and taking it out on their family even harder. To put it bluntly, in many cases, if you really wanted to do their family a favor, the best thing to do would be to kill them, to erase them from existence in some way that would cause the least trauma to those under their influence. How many here weren't happy when Karl whacked the abusive boyfriend with the lawnmower blade in Sling Blade? Of course, if you went around rendering those kind of verdicts on people you encountered and carried them out, you'd end up as a whole different order of monster... so, I think that realistically you have to limit your intervention to cases where there is immanent physical danger.
Another whole issue to look into is the extent to which you feel responsible for everything that happens around you. While social conscience might be a good thing, is it a good thing if you feel like every incident that enters your consciousness is somehow your responsibility? Realistically, very little is your responsiblity in the sense that you purposefully had some hand in the creating the situation at hand. If you think harmonizing the subway guy and his family is your responsibility even though practically you are uninvolved and virtually incapable of altering the situation, is this a good way to live?
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