Profundity in a bowl of Cheerios

I just read a piece about Tom Arnold in that little magazine thing that comes in the papers on Saturday. You know, the color thing with a few semi-useful semi-interesting facts about life, lots of ads aimed at old people—cheesy ceramic sculptures, over-priced coins and erectile dysfunction drugs/machinery. On Saturday morning before my back loosens up it’s too tempting to lean over the kitchen counter and read crap like that in the newspaper while eating a bowl of Cheerios.
Anyway, about Tom; I don’t care a fig about Tom Arnold and I can’t remember ever seeing a film he was in. But the profile mentioned all the Tom Arnold/Bad-Boy legends that even a Hollywoodphobe like me knows. It also listed a few things he does that are really classy. He donated a 1000-acre farm to the community college in his home town, gives two full scholarships to college kids each year, supports Special Olympics, blah blah.
What caught my imagination was the mention that he and his wife had separated, planning to divorce but that after splitting had decided they may be able to work things out. He said being apart let them look at each other with a new light and see some of the reasons they struggled with each other, and so were able to come to agreement or at least cope with their differences.
At some level, we are all just poor schlubs trying to bang our way through life with as little damage as possible. Who really knows why they do some of the hammer-headed things they do? If it’s so hard to figure ourselves out, how can we ever propose to understand why another person goes off the rails? People need to be accountable for what they say and do, and it’s proper to call a guy for bad behavior. But in fairness, we shouldn’t be too eager to blast another person for some (usually) minor crime unless we can honestly say we have at least a shadow of understanding as to why they are doing what they do. And if we know the person, can we justify ourselves in using them as bad examples if we haven’t done something (not including moralizing to others about them or making lists of their faults) to make life easier for them?
It’s comforting to find people whose lives are a bigger train wreck than our own. It’s a little less comforting when we find one of those people actually learning from their foibles and improving their life, while our best talents may be directed in identifying and pointing out new and more egregious bad examples.