So the past few days I have found myself challenged, in a good way, by the concept of hatred and the roll it has played in my life.
It started innocently enough with the passing of Jesse Helms.
I started the thread about his death in the current events section and knew it would probably be controversial and there was a good amount of back and forth. For a person who does his best to slink away from confrontation I can say I have seen much worse. The conflict seemed to come from how was the proper way to view the death of the controversial politician. You can go over there and read for yourself, I have given myself a dead line on this one.
I will admit that when I heard the news I felt a sort of excitement, he was someone I had loathed in my time and that I had lived to see the day he was no more felt like a vindication.
But it was a far cry from when Nixon resigned.
First I would like to say I am mostly Irish and I voluntarily reinforce the stereotype that we can hold grudge unlike anyone else. When I visited the island in 1996 and took my friends' Auntie Eilo cartons of cigarettes, she told me countless stories of people who had done her wrong, of the Church her family did not attend for a century because a priest had made some offense against them involving the expropriation of a donkey, it was flabbergasting.
When I was 4 years old I can remember waiting int he car when my mother got out on a rainy day to retrieve a box strapped to our mail box from the Democrat Party of Virginia, addressed to my father. It was a dart board with Richard Nixon's picture on it. They hated Nixon. What had Nixon done to them? He was a Republican and had won the 1968 election!
By 1974 his career was over, and I reveled in it. I didn't understand the first thing about Watergate but I painted a bed sheet with a caricature of him with the words "Kick Nixon Out". When my mother told me one afternoon at the back door that he was expected to appear that night on TV to resign I danced the happy dance. I even tried recording the audio with my tape recorder, which as fate would have it shorted out on that critical occasion and I only got static.
This lead to hatred of that particular brand of audio instruments, the name now long forgotten, and eventual hatred of Gerald Ford for pardoning that criminal. The purchase of a new one was not done at Sears, for an offense my mother had perceived from them in 1970, and don't even get me started on Jimmy Carter.
I think about these things now, the need to rush to judgement of a thing as either good or bad as part of the eternal "we vs. them " game that has been going on for ages. Eurasia vs. Eastasia, black and white compartmentalization, left over from the days when one had to quickly sum up a judgement about a development because life depended on it.
When I was about 25 I met a relative who has to be the Queen of all Judgements. She had no room for any dissension from what she thought was right. Dismissed me all together when I made some remark that probably had an off color word in it and thismissed my mother, who had been her seamstress, when she found out she was also doing work for a woman whose reputation she did not approve of.
Insanity I tell you!
Gradually over time my mind became so full of the running score of this opinion and that opinion I could not handle it any more and probably while watching some PBS documentary about Joseph Campbell or Desmond Tutu I learned how destructive it really was. I learned how to practice forgiveness because it frees you from the offense, real or imagined, that someone else has done to you.
It is also easier said than done. Rich and Chuck can tell you, I have a postcard of Ronald and Nancy Reagan on my livingroom wall I bought in DuPont Circle in Washington, D.C. in 1983. When I moved in to my house in 1990 I affixed it one drunken night to the wall with a roofing nail thru Reagan's heart.
Everytime I think of taking it down all I can think about is how the clawhammer could potentially damage the card more.
Topic: Shakesthegrounds Rumblings (Read 2596149 times)