A little over a week ago last Thursday I had a meltdown that resulted in a pretty good rant
Thinking about saying good bye
In the list of things that I had happen that Thursday, I discussed stopping by a fellow Kerry supporter's house and helping her put up a new yard sign to replace the one that was stolen the night before. But what I didn't talk about was the thinking process that happened as I was hurrying around in the busyness of my life.
I was driving up the street to her house and passing all these HUGE BC signs and signs for the Republican running for Senate on the hate platform when I started getting madder and madder about how hate and the encouragement and acceptance of hate is just growing in the country.
I thought how could these people be "Christians" while actually encouraging division and non-acceptance of others. And it didn't matter if the reason for rejection was sexual orientation, religious orientation or political orientation, if someone was one of "THEM", then they were to be minimalized and marginalized; they way the Bush WH has marginalized AT LEAST 49% of the American population because they are not republicans who blindly and without thought support his administration.
Then a realization came to me, one of those epiphanies. I had become like them. In my anger over their intolerance, I had become intolerant. In becoming angry over their hate, I began to hate. How could I be any better then them if I was angry and mad just as they were? We were angry and mad over different sides of the same thing but we were identical in our emotional state of being.
Like I said, Thursday was a long, long day.
Back during the Reagan years, I was listening to a presidential historian on NPR (maybe Arthur Schlesinger, maybe Theodore White) discuss how the national persona becomes a reflection of the persona of the individual in the white house. I remember this was during the Reagan presidency because it explained the whole absent-mindedness, lassie faire, poor boot strapping themselves out of poverty, leverage of non-existent capital mind sets that took hold during his term in office. As I remember the historian's statement, he said the inner psyche of the president somehow becomes manifested as the general "mood" of the nation, sort of like alpha-dog or menstrual cycle influence syndrome.
As I mediated on how the presidential emotional persona becomes the national emotional persona, I started seeing how the Bush presidency has developed and grown in paranoia, hate and fear and why those things are important in their campaign for 2004. It should not have come with any surprise that he attempts to isolate himself or that people have to take a "pledge to Bush" at his campaign. It should not come as any surprise that his inner hate, his inner fear and his mistrust of anything other than his own ideas run rampant over the campaign. His supporters are fed his fear, they eat it and feel it grow inside them and enjoy the power that hate and anger and self-righteousness gives them.
And anger begets anger. Fear begets fear. Hate begets hate. That is one of the lost lessons from 9/11, that the national mood and action following 9/11 have been cast in the core of hate and fear and anger. A natural reaction to the attack? Yes, certainly the first impulse someone who is attacked has is to fight back, the first thing we do when we are hurt is look to hurt the one who hurt us. It is a little child's response. An eye for an eye dies still lives; although that law was suppose to be replaced with compassion, love and acceptance. But I would also point out that over time, to carry this fear and hate and anger for so long eventually warps and twists those who carry it so that it becomes "normal" to hate and fear everyone. Hate and fear become "normal".
So I became angry. Then I became angry at becoming angry. Then enlightenment.
There is the old Zen story about the warrior who asks a master what is hell is like. The master immediately begins insulting the warrior, saying the warrior was an uneducated peasant, to shallow to understand such teachings, calling him everything that would trigger an angry and violent response. And as the warrior became madder and madder, eventually losing control of his reason, he grabbed the hilt of his sword, pulled it free and raised it in the air with the intent of beheading the master. At which point the master said "That is hell" and the warrior became enlightened.
For the past couple of weeks, I've mediated on this realization. I have thought about what it means if Bush maintains the White House, what it means if Kerry wins and how do we change this national psyche.
I've thought about the mood and manifestations of diary entries on Kos. I've noticed the growing number of diary titles that ooze hate and anger. I've noticed how some threads in the conversations descended into anger/hate-filled exchanges. I noticed when the Kos and PastorDan entries on Community Norms, how some of the threads and conversations developed angry exchanges that did not resolve any of the issues and became those very things that separate communities and separate people.
From an earlier diary post Hate Speech and Leadership, to quote John Sack from his essay on the lessons of hate:
"So at the lectern in the grand ballroom on Monday, I (the author, John Sack) spoke about hate.
"There are," I said, "eighty-five thousand books about the Holocaust. And none has an honest answer to How could the Germans do it? The people who gave us Beethoven, the Ninth Symphony, the Ode to Joy, Alle Menshen warden Bruder, all men become brothers. How could the Germans perpetrate the Holocaust? This mystery, we've got to solve it, or we'll keep having genocides in Cambodia, Bosnia, Zaire.
Well," I said, "what I report in An Eye for an Eye is Lola" - the heroine, the commandant of a terrible prison in Gliwitz, Germany - "Lola has solved it. The Jews have solved it. Because in their agony, their despair, their insanity, if you will, they felt they became like the Germans - the Nazis - themselves. And if I had been there," I said, "I'd have become one too, and now I understand why.
A lot of Jews, understandably, were full of hate in 1945, they were volcanoes full of red-hot hate. They thought if they spit out the hate at the Germans, then they'd be rid of it.
"No, It doesn't work that way. Let's say I'm in love with someone. I don't tell myself, Uh-oh, I've got inside of me two pounds of love, and if I love her and love her, then I'll use all of my love up - I'd be out of love.
No, I understand and we all understand that love is a paradoxical thing, that the more we send out, the more we've got. So why don't we understand that about hate? If we hate, and we act on that hate, we stimulate the saliva glands and we produce a drop and a quarter of it. If we spit that out, then two drops, three, a teaspoon, tablespoon, a Mount Saint Helens. The more we send out, the more we've got, until we are perpetual-motion machines, sending out hate and hate until you've created a holocaust.
You don't have to be a German to become like that. You can be a Serb, a Hutu, a Jew - you can be an American. We were the ones in the Philippines; we were the ones in Vietnam....We all have it in us to become like the Nazis.
Hate, as Lola discovered, is a muscle, and if we want to be monsters, all we have to do is exercise it. To hate the Germans, to hate the Arabs, to hate the Jews. The longer we exercise it, the bigger it gets, as if every day we curl forty pounds and, far from being worn out, in time we are curling fifty, sixty, we are the Mr. Universe of Hate, the Heinrich Himmler. We all can be hate-full people, hateful people. We can destroy the people we hate, maybe, but we will surely destroy ourselves."
For the past week, I've wondered "if we can't be civil to each other in this Kos community, if we can't accept tolerance of ideas and opinions from individuals who have the same goal and orientation here, how can we re-create a nation where diversity and acceptance of a number of alternative solutions are explored?"
There seems to be a gallons and gallons of hate out there on the net. And it's seeping into Kos.
As the warrior learned, first step is recognizing the problem. After tomorrow (Nov 2), Kerry will need all of the support and help to combat internal hate and discord. I am not optimistic about the outcome but hate must be overcome, and fighting hate with more hate is not the answer.
For me, I try to practice mindfullness of the emotions that get raised, to pray that I be given tolerance and patience, to promise not to call republicans re-thugs or other things that designate them as different or lesser than me and my democratic friends.