Ponder an opinion written 4 years ago with focus on realities of hate in America today.
Pondering hate has my head in a spin, who decides what is or isn’t hate? The sobering fact being; my views of right and wrong are considered equally hateful by millions of people who see things differently. Last night I wrote about Christian Kerodin, the convicted felon behind plans for “The Citadel” – a fortified city accepting applications from prospective residents who want nothing more than to live with “like minded” people. Like minded in this case meaning an insular society free from “liberals”, city government or taxes, recycling, and criminal or background checks. All “The Citadel” asks in return is that you arrive with your own weapons, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, and the attitude needed to use them.
As repugnant as I find this, the reality is – Kerodin has served his time for extortion, isn’t breaking any laws, and under his constitutional rights can say anything he…
View original post 192 more words
notestoponder 
When people feel their values are threatened they fight back or retreat – circle the wagon trains.
There was lot of that when apartheid was on the way out.
Considering the levels of violence these days I wonder if some these people weren’t on the right track – but for all the wrong reasons, if that makes any sense?
The reality is that the foundations for these divisions in society were laid down hundreds of years ago.
Colonialism is one reason. Greed.
Now we must reap what was sown.
I find myself having to agree with the “Now we must reap what was sown” comment. Considering that we are 150-ish years from the U.S. Civil War — meaning specifically later — and we in the U.S. have managed to transmit the same sentiments about race to the current generation as were present all that time ago it is difficult for me to fathom what formula may exist for countering hatred. Clearly some people do not CHOOSE to stop hating. Jews & Arabs have hated for centuries. The rounds of so-called “ethnic cleansing” that have taken place in my lifetime were not the results of a single point in time, they were the results of decades and centuries of built up animosity.
Is the human animal so flawed that it cannot survive without hate? Sometimes one wonders.
I don’t know whether “hate” has any connection with “freedom” The notion that one is free to do whatever one wants is wonderfully liberating but also dangerously inflammatory. It seems there was a time in the past when “freedom” was balanced against “social responsibility” – a time when we accepted that while we were free to do many things that it was in everyone’s best interests NOT to do certain of them in exchange for the benefit of living in an orderly society. Today it seems that an increasing number of people live with the illusion that they can survive on their own without the benefit of society, or a larger society than they choose to submit to. There is no end-game there. At some point a never ending narrowing of social contacts ultimately leaves a person isolated.
How, on a practical level, do you change the child-rearing practices of the poorest and least educated among us? How on a practical level to you negate the lessons of first-look-out-for-number-one and augment ideals of leadership instead of bullying and cooperation instead of isolation? I really don’t know. We expose the young to so many influences and then find ourselves shocked that they have absorbed messages from them that we were never aware enough to see contained in those influences — any more than we see the personality traits in ourselves that our children adopt and then wonder “Oh, where did they get that from.”