For some, it is easier to avoid reality than it is to confront festering memories of beatings and rapes, everyday indignities and repeated humiliations.

The Everyday Indignities Certain women insist that the small, everyday indignities can corrode their will and their morale more than the larger issues.

We hope for an end to this crisis and the beginning of a real transition that brings about respect of Syrians' human rights and an end to killing and torturing of peaceful protesters, and an end to the everyday indignities that Syrian men and women must suffer.

Q. Black writers have long maintained that the everyday indignities of racism can set off illness.

But Miles, beautifully played by Paul Giamatti, hasn't yet been broken by his divorce, unpublished novels and the accumulation of everyday indignities that have helped make him the man he is.

When the No. 3 train stopped in the tunnel under Brooklyn Heights yesterday morning, it seemed to Milton Puryear just another of those everyday indignities of life in New York.

Others have endured the sort of everyday indignities that would have been unthinkable just a few months ago.

And the everyday indignities do not even reflect what is probably the majorities' ultimate perquisite: the ability to gerrymander legislative districts every 10 years during reapportionment, which makes most majority incumbents hard to oust on Election Day.

More than a few New Yorkers wonder what difference the extra police will make to the everyday indignities they witness.

Many Iraqis, especially the Shiites and Kurds, still harbor grim memories from the days of Mr. Hussein, and their gratitude to the Americans, and their desire to get on with rebuilding their country, appears in many places to outweigh the everyday indignities of military occupation.