Hate is Poison

Trying to bring this country together may seem like a lost cause, but it’s never too late to do the right thing. The problem with  making that work is the politicians that run this country and the media that reports what is going on. Some nut kid shoots his way through a store in Buffalo killing ten people and we find that he has written a 181 page manifesto attacking the usual targets and no one paid any attention to it. But if they did and tried to stop this kid before he killed anyone, the Progressives would be all over his right to free speech, the Right would be defending his right to carry a machine gun and the 1% would just shake their heads and start checking real estate prices in Italy and the south of France.

The politicians try to sell us the idea that there is a way to eliminate hate and bring us together. Really? Do these guys ever look at anything except their poll numbers? Just take a quick glance at the world around us. Fully half the people in that world are trying to kill the other half. And it’s always been that way.

I’m an old man and I never remember a time that wasn’t filled with hate and prejudice. That doesn’t mean you can’t run a world despite it. The players may have changed but the game has always been the same.

I grew up in the 40s and 50s in a middle class neighborhood in New Jersey. There was only one black household in the whole neighborhood. It consisted of an elderly lady and her thirtyish daughter who “went to business.” Maybe it was prejudice, or maybe it was that no one had anything in common with them but they seemed rather isolated so when it snowed my mother would send me over to shovel their walk. The lady would come out, thank me and give me a cookie. One day Mr. Tully, the father of one of my best friends, came out of his house across the street from where I was shoveling and watched me for a couple of minutes.

“Your mother tell you to do that?” he asked.

I nodded.

“She’s nuts,” he said shaking his head and turned into his house.

I told my mother what Tully had said. She got a funny little smile on her face.

“Mr. Tully drinks,” she murmured and walked out of the kitchen.

There has always been prejudice and there always will be. It’s rooted in that tribal instinct that draws us together.  Contrary to popular opinion, I think this country has handled it better than our European neighbors who have pushed all their immigrants into ghettos while here we try to integrate them into the general population.

What we didn’t have before was today’s communication, so our prejudices didn’t spread as fast or as far or as efficiently. We also didn’t have automatic weapons readily available so we couldn’t make as big a point of our petty hatreds. That, and all of the above, lead to the point I am trying to make.

Our search for freedom in all things has made us prisoner to the excesses of that all-inclusive freedom. We want freedom without responsibility and that, my friends, just doesn’t work.

From where I stand the big thing that has changed from the old days when there was plenty of hatred to the current times, when there is still more hatred than is acceptable, seems to be that people used to have a sense of practiced right and wrong that is missing from today’s world. There have always been people who did the wrong thing, but they were castigated for it.  Now we have people who obviously do the wrong thing and then brag about it and are celebrated for it. And worse, many of us accept it.

Take our presidents, the most important job in the country. It’s amazing how many idiots or criminals we have elected to that office. Just in my lifetime we have had three that immediately come to mind, Richard Nixon, George Bush and Donald Trump. At least Nixon and Bush didn’t advertise the fact that Nixon was a criminal and Bush an idiot. In fact they tried to hide these character flaws because they remembered a time when that would have kept them from being elected to anything. Then along came Trump He looked around, saw that being a crook or a fool was not a serious encumbrance to becoming president and jumped in. Only he didn’t try to hide his flaws, he turned them into assets and a lot of really stupid people followed him. These people are willing to accept an ill-mannered buffoon who glories in being a bigot and a cheap crook and who aspires to dictatorship, because it’s what they would want for themselves. And even though they aren’t a majority, they think they should be, and they will do anything to achieve their goals, including an attempt to overthrow the government and subvert democracy.

This country has always understood that anarchy is the end of civilization. Our government has always had enough stability to maintain the level playing field necessary to keep the country in line. It didn’t seem to need a plethora of laws to maintain that stability because we almost always seemed to elect people who had the country’s best interests at heart. Our leaders had just enough common sense to do the job. Now we are electing raving maniacs to congress and the presidency and it becomes seriously clear that we need some very stringent laws to control a new kind of self-serving leader who will, given the freedom, destroy the nation in search of their own goals.

What am I talking about? The fact that the DOJ is looking at all the semi-criminal activity perpetrated by Trump and his administration and somehow is finding it difficult to prosecute a bunch of the most obvious criminals in history. Why? Some feel the laws that are needed to convict do not exist. Many, even on the Democratic side, are loath to prosecute outgoing administrations for fear they will set a precedent that will become each new administrations revenge factor.

Look, we are never going to eliminate hate, it’s endemic to the human DNA but what we can and must do is return structure to the process of governing the country. We must elect candidates who understand that their job is to lead the country for the people and to create conditions that will lead to better lives for all their constituents. The hate will not disappear but people living functional, productive lives have a lot less reason to practice it.