All Apologies

I'm thinking of the little girl who I asked to apologize to her classmate who was hit in a flurry of displeasure that she could not contain. At the top of her little lungs, she shouted, "I'm sorry, okay?" This was after some cajoling and a moment or two to relax. There just wasn't an apology in there. Not a sincere one anyway.
Later that day, I stopped a boy who was rushing off into a throng of his peers, pushing them aside as he made his way to wherever he was headed, probably into another throng of his peers. When I finally caught up to him, he was fuming. At me. His jaw was clenched and his fists were clenched. "What?" He growled. I asked him to slow down and be a little considerate of those around him. "Whatever," he sniffed, "Can I go now?" This kid had not seen his tenth birthday. The question that rang in my head was this: "Where did all this anger come from?"
The next day, on my way to work, I watched a pickup truck try and squeeze past a bus going the opposite direction. The pickup's over-sized side view mirrors began to scrape along the side of the bus. The bus driver slid her window open and began to scream at the diver of the pickup. The driver of the pickup rolled down his window, as he continued to make his way down the side of the bus, and screamed back. Then they were done. There was no reconciliation, just scratches along the length of the bus and elevated blood pressure across the board.
I thought about how each one of those incidents was like a virus, and how we are all carriers. I thought about the way we avoid people when they're sick, and how we hope that keeps us safe. Until we run into a someone or something that activates that flips our switch or trips our trigger. It made me think of the times that I lost my temper. Then I thought that this wasn't an accurate description, since I knew exactly where my temper was: It was boiling over onto someone else. For that, I apologize.