Heavy Heart

I've been avoiding the news for awhile now because it makes me want to cry.  The political scene is the saddest of my life.  It looks to me like people are prepared to do anything to get into office.  The only things I see right now are when I'm flipping channels on my way to something else, but apparently a little physical violence is starting to appear - inevitably.  And these are grown people who want to run the country!

As a problem solver, I'm constantly wondering what motivates people to do this stuff.  We humans are very flawed in a lot of ways and have been throughout the time we've been on the earth, apparently.  The only way I could even speculate what would cause this insanity is to try to picture what my motives would be if I were participating in this.  Since there was a time when I was doing what I call the "we're right and you're wrong and so you are evil and anything we think up to do to evil people is okay" thing, I was motived by fear and self-righteousness.  For me at least, at that time of my life, I felt crappy about myself and powerless to do anything about it.  Casting myself on the "right" side, and attacking those evil people, made me feel better.  Plus I felt like those evil people had the power and I had to fight like a banshee just to stay even.  Thank God, thanks to the program, I no longer feel that way and so get no pleasure from being on the "right" side.

I was brought up to be a racist but it didn't take.  I just didn't see the evidence for the belief that people other than white, Anglo-Saxon, protestants were bad.  But since that was how I grew up I think I can imagine what I would feel if a black president were elected.  I think I would be scared to death that he would do something to white people to get even.  There's a lot to get even for.  I think I would be scared to death that other black people would feel emboldened to do the same.  I think I would believe that it would be necessary to try to get the upper hand before that happened.  And once I noticed that scared white people would pretend to (or actually) believe pretty much anything if it made the president look evil and scary, I might go all out with a bunch of other crazy lies - like the legislator in Texas who says the Arabs are smuggling pregnant women into the US so that they can have their babies be American citizens and then take them back to the Arab world to be raised as terrorists.  Then, of course, when they're ready they can come back to the US because they will be citizens and blow us all up.  That's creative but....

I don't know.  I don't think I want to live to be a hundred so I can see how this comes out.  My friend, Gil, used to say that this crap would keep happening and get worse and worse until a significant number of humans on the planet had grown enough emotionally and intellectually so that they realized how crazy this shit is and how it has never in history made life any better for anybody.  So I guess I will just keep working on growing and helping other people grow.  It's the only thing I can think of to do.