I attended a lecture recently, one of those lovely, open-to-the-public visiting speakers offered by Northern Michigan University.

I sat behind a young woman who had a beautiful golden retriever at her feet wearing a service dog’s vest. The woman wore a black pea coat that she never took off, with a thin, pink knitted scarf beneath short curly brown hair.

Seated to her right was a row of pretty blonde people – stylish, athletic, jabbery. I didn’t take much note of any of them, but as the talk got rolling, something familiar happened.

The girl in the pea coat let out the smallest noise from beneath her round countenance.

I continued listening to the lecture because I don’t think flatulence is a big deal, but like clockwork those two blonde girls turned to each other unable to restrain their own small explosion of giggling.

The girl in the pea coat, who was unattractive by conventional standards, glanced at them, her features betraying mortification. The blondes saw her face and doubled back, laughing harder. This was incredibly hilarious to them.

The lecturer noticed and acknowledged their giggling, assuming it was about her talk, which was on how the human brain experiences love and sex – a fair assumption to make. But this also was funny to the girls and their mirth continued.

They eventually reigned it in, though the two remained in high spirits to the end, at which point, as they were heading toward the exit, one of them leapt onto the back of the tall, fit, Scandinavian guy she was sitting next to, and rode him out of the room.

But before that, not long after the giggling episode, the curly-haired girl’s phone rang. She gathered up her purse and the harness of her sweet-faced golden retriever – whom she’d turned to for comfort as the girls were hunched over seizing – and she took the call outside, never coming back.

The subject of the talk was interesting. The neuroscientist was funny and disarming, resembling a pregnant, married Amy Schumer, except much more appropriate and a scientist.

She told us about how love is a critical human need, like food, water and air. She said all the different kinds of love – for parents, babies, friends, pets, lovers – register in the brain differently, but that humans all suffer from physical and psychological illnesses in the absence of love.

Well, in light of the lecture’s subject matter, I wanted to smack those blondes where their dark roots were showing, but I didn’t. To them, their laughter didn’t seem offensive at all and they were blind to their own privilege.

I learned once that this unconscious insensitivity to another’s experience of suffering is called a “micro-aggression.” The mean girls didn’t consider that, not only is it rude to laugh at someone else’s expense, but their classmate in the pea coat was likely hearing about love and sex from a different perspective than their own. But why should they care?

As someone who is empathic to an almost freakish degree, I couldn’t help but feel the girl’s pain at being singled out and mocked. I remember being on the receiving end of that singular kind of wound. It hurts, isolates and teaches a person the world is an unfriendly, unsafe place.

Well, I guess the world can be just that. But why does it have to be?

Why do we pass on the disease of fear and insecurity to others, putting them down in a fruitless attempt to cure our own fear and insecurity? We are just continuing the cycle.

But this is part of our evolutionary biology. We create power structures through social means and we fight each other for the top like crabs in a bucket.

What we eventually learn though – hopefully – is that the real cure for our fears and insecurities is to open the heart, know we’re all experiencing the same things, and become more aware of what’s outside the boundaries of our own self. In the end, we’re all in this together. We need each other. Wounding others is wounding the world is wounding ourselves.

I was grateful for that service dog with her big soulful eyes, who licked the hand of her human companion with what seemed the highest form of wisdom. We have a lot to learn from such love, which is never self conscious or fake, is the perfect medicine for any troubled heart and is a beautiful reminder that loving kindness is a powerful, necessary force in this world. If only we all could be of such service.

Editor’s note: Mary Wardell can be reached at 906-228-2500, ext. 248.