A face to complain to

There is a breakfast cart near the seafront in Khobar where the same men stand every morning eating beans from paper plates.

They know each other a little. They know the man behind the cart. When the bread runs short, someone gives his share to the latecomer. When the beans are too salty one morning, somebody says so, quietly, and the next morning they are not. Complaints happen there, but they happen to a face, from a face, and both faces will be back tomorrow.

Then a clip of the cart goes round online, and a different crowd arrives in the comments. Most of them have never eaten there. They have no names, or names that mean nothing, and they will have moved on by the weekend. Within a day the cart is too dirty, too cheap, too popular, not popular enough. Each comment is a little crueller than the one above it, because cruelty is what earns the next reply.

They are not a different kind of people. Plenty of them stand at carts like this one every morning and would never speak to the cook that way. What changed was not who they are but what the group is. A group where people are known, stay, and will meet again tends to pull them towards their better selves. A group of strangers who can drop in and disappear at no cost tends to pull the other way.

A crowd like that cannot make the beans better. It has nobody to answer to and nothing to fix, only someone to pile on.

The men by the seafront are still there each morning. They are the only ones who ever helped the cart.