- What is hateful to you, do not unto others.
If I need to be heard, and when you need to talk I cover my ears and hum loudly, what am I?
Certainly no better than Marjorie Taylor Greene, the day her divorce from Perry Greene was finalized last December, absent from Congress, voting by proxy, after introducing a bill to ban proxy voting.
Hurt people hurt people.
Marjorie, in a muscular fundraising tweet, is now calling for the Trump states to secede, a national divorce, presumably with generous alimony from the “blue states” that subsidize the former Confederacy. If you ask her she’ll probably tell you that the Northern War of Aggression was never actually won by the bellicose Union, that the victorious Confederacy was stabbed in the back by traitorous you know whats, like the victorious German army was at the end of the World War. No conflict is ever settled in a hurt heart.
I can write all the impossible letters I want. The more persuasive, the more impossible. Heck of a job, Brownie.
Still, if we do to others what we hate done to us, we are wrong. Simple enough for even a Q-Anon believer to grasp, no?
Nothing is simple to a hurt heart that can’t find peace, except by hurting others. After he lost the 2020 election Trumpie mashed the accelerator to make sure his killing spree of federal death row inmates went full speed ahead. Barr was right there with him, executing more federal prisoners than the previous ten administrations combined, until he was among the first rabid rats to jump the sinking ship. Now MAGA-man is promising to execute everyone he possibly can in his next term as president. Why not kill them by firing squad, by public hanging? Why stop there, the Elizabethans drew out the spectacle by eviscerating, hanging, but not until dead, reviving, dismembering, hanging again, and so on. The master showman of MAGA knows how electrifying this kind of chilling spectacle, even just the titillating promise of it, is to people smarting from their own agonizing pain. Plus, it’s great for fundraising!
Is everybody who loves this kind of thing stupid? No, sad to say. Is everybody who loves this kind of thing filled with hurt, fear and rage? I don’t know, but I’d bet most of them are. How much easier is it to get a legal assault weapon and take it out on a bunch of strangers than to sit with unbearable pain in your heart? Apparently much easier for all mass shooters. I love the mass media’s eternal search for the “gunman’s” motive. So American.
In the corporate media there are two sides to every story, as long as there’s monetary profit in the conflict. One side might be barking mad, but, now that the quaint “Fairness Doctrine” is a footnote in our history, both sides are given the same weight in public discussion by biased media companies catering to their “base”. In one set of reports Anthony Fauci did everything possible to help curb deadly Covid-19 in a country that set world records for infections and deaths per capita. To millions of others, who will never watch that kind of lying crap, Fauci is a fucking liar who deserves crucifixion, this Easter, nobody in the US died of the China flu! Both sides make a legitimate point, you know, here in the land where fairness and justice reign, alongside equally compelling, always maddening, unfairness and injustice. Get over it, asshole.
It is all in the way the story is told. I can convince you, if you are inclined to believe me, that I’ve been the innocent victim of people who brutally hurt me every time I tried to make peace. I can’t convince you, if you are inclined to believe others, who say that they are the innocent victims of my brutality and unforgiving heartlessness as I constantly spin the real facts like a scripture quoting Beelzebub.
Hurt people hurt people, and the only way out of the cycle of hurt is through a certain kind of honesty and courage, which can also be construed as despicable dishonesty and cowardice, depending on who’s telling the story.
To say that love is the only solution to conflict is a bit simplistic. There are many versions of love and endless variations on each version, with a hundred conditions. Hate, on the other hand, we know at once what we hate. How much easier it is not to inflict hateful things on others than to be like Jesus, constantly turning the other cheek whenever struck, repaying scorn and cruelty with love and compassion? I know what I hate, I try not to do it to other people. Pretty straightforward, no?
Oh, well. Time to get back to writing some more impossible letters.