a truly foul mouth

Last night we had a great time with our friends Josh and Deborah and Josh's Mom who is visiting from Reno, where we enjoyed some of the best lasagna ever (eggplant) and some good laughs.
However, all was not well on the way home. Mira and I were riding home from their place and had a terrible train experience. When we got on, we noticed a pretty strong odor, probably coming from the man who had no place to call home. This in itself is not the part of the ride that made the trip terrible; sometimes people smell bad--sometimes I smell bad. When it happens, you just have to tough it out and be mindful of our incredibly privileged position to shower, which is something that most people in the world are unable to do on a regular basis. This is a concept that was quite obviously lost on the three gentlemen who sat behind us. I am not sure if they had been drinking, but even if they were, it gives them no right to say some of the hateful things they were saying about "the smell," which probably came from "some rotting homeless guy." The most frustrating thing for us was being frozen in our inability to respond to their terrible and loud comments. Is it worth getting into a (perhaps physical) fight over? Is it right to humiliate them for their own rotten behavior? I just cannot understand how anyone could possibly treat another human being this way. Truly they represented white American privilege in the worst way.