I had to go buy a little bottle of artificial tears for my mother tonight. That's an odd thing to be buying in America right now — crying is very nearly forbidden.

She's 87. She has dry eye. The rest of us don't cry because it means we're weak and we have feelings for things. School shootings. The homeless. The poor. We argue over those things, and we use them to score points, but we do not cry.

I went to a dollar store on an urban street, across from a Chinese restaurant whose menu includes fried plantains, next to a Pakistani-run cigarette and convenience store, two doors down from an auto parts store.

When I got to the register at the dollar store with my $2.15 bottle of tears, there was an old-style school bell on the counter and a hand-lettered sign reading, "ring bell for service."

I rang.

A woman in her 30s, short and round, came in from outside, where she'd been standing, smoking a cigarette.

"Sorry," she said.

"It's all right," I said. "You were on your break. I get breaks on my job."

"Especially when you've been here since 8," she said.

It was 7 p.m.

"I just got off," I told her. "I started at 9."

"I'm here till 10," she told me.

"You win," I said. "I'm working 11 days straight, though. You?"

"I'm off Sunday," she said.

"I win that one," I told her.

She laughed.

"We're even then," she said. "You want a little bag for that?"

"That's ok," I said.

I put the bottle of tears in my pocket and left the store.

I'm writing this and it's 8:30 p.m., so I guess we're both still working, but at least I'm doing it in my own home, in stocking feet, smoking a pipe. If I want to go to the bathroom, I don't have to put a little bell and a note on my desk.

It strikes me, in my cold little home office, next to an un-insulated wall, that those of us who work at anything should love each other, should care for each other and, yes, should cry for each other.

A million cruel voices tell me to look down on that woman, to climb up on my master's degree and look way down at her and she should have tried harder. Hundreds of angry political voices tell me the working poor are funny tattooed clowns who earn exactly what they're worth. See the slumped little man sweeping the floor in the bank? Dumb good-for-nothing. He oughta learn English if he's gonna come here.

And the funny thing is, the guys at the very top can't tell the difference between white-collar me and the guy sweeping the floor. They set us at each other's throats and they pay us the lowest wages they can. Suburb hates trailer park. Trailer park hates black ghetto. Everybody knows the guy one step further down the ladder deserves to be there because he's lazy.

We all have dry eye.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers an cartoonists, visit www.creators.com Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns from 2014 is called, "Marc Dion: Vol. I" and is available for Nook and Kindle.

Photo credit: Andy Atzert