As I was growing up I always hated tomatoes, not spaghetti sauce, rather raw unadulterated tomatoes. Also hated them as chunks in chilli or stew, couldn’t stand the texture, the taste, nothing about them appealed and they always made me gag.
Over the years I’ve slowly developed a taste as my taste buds grew up and now I can happily have them in stew or chilli, even once grew my own and had the most deliciously amazing heritage Beefsteak, dripping with flavour, and even so, I was stunned by that.
It didn’t happen overnight, it took years, but hating anything is counterproductive, and always blinds you to truths you are cut off from due to one’s hatred. Like, how would I have known that it is really just yucky grocery store tomatoes I dislike? In fact, when I have that delicious heritage homegrown tomatoes my tastebuds do a happy dance.
Hate can be a powerful thing, like a drug, it rises with the bile in your gut in times of stress, it takes over and gives one that jolt of euphoria, like a “hate circuit” is pressed and we become irrational and unable to discern fact from fiction.
“Acts of hate are attempts to distract oneself from feelings such as helplessness, powerlessness, injustice, inadequacy and shame. Hate is grounded in some sense of perceived threat. It is an attitude that can give rise to hostility and aggression toward individuals or groups. Like much of anger, it is a reaction to and distraction from some form of inner pain. The individual consumed by hate may believe that the only way to regain some sense of power over his or her pain is to preemptively strike out at others. In this context, each moment of hate is a temporary reprieve from inner suffering.”
PSYCHOLOGY TODAY | The Psychology of Hate
We look around today and we see it more and more in our daily lives. Not just on TV, but right before us in line at the grocery store, on the street, even in our own homes. It soothes many in times of crisis, under stress, and it is so much easier than putting some effort in and getting to know people, places, things, just easier to hate, for some.
It’s that “hate circuit” that the GOP has learned how to trigger and with the rise of Newt Gingrich and his hate-mongering mantra spawned the Tea Party, and here we are now with Republicans today that have made hate into a platform, a podium on which to stand.
Hate is a path to power, demonizing the opponent has been made into a kind of party platform, encouraging voters that voting for so and so (anyone liberal) would be evil. Republicans realize that voters left to their own devices, with no gerrymandering of electoral boundaries or any of the other dodgy crap they’ve pulled, without all that most voters vote Democrat and Newt saw hate as a very motivating emotion, as it goes beyond reason and, well, hate is a very powerful weapon to wield.
We saw clear as day during the mid-terms, in Kansas, North Carolina, Ohio, all over the country the GOP was playing power politics and fixing it so that their ‘guy’ would win, or ensuring that if they lost whoever came after loses certain governing powers.
No longer are they really selling any cohesive platform, no longer are they selling themselves as the ethics and preserving family values party, no longer are they the little guy party, instead, they have become the party of gaining power and keeping power. It is not about making it better for everyone but instead hating all those who do not look like them, act like them or believe what they believe.
Hate is the GOP platform and it is their most powerful tool. In hate of a group one is empowered, like a sugar rush, it fuels up the tank and makes them feel like they are a part of something – US vs THEM.
You know, it is just easier to hate, it triggers some of the same circuits as love but instead, you are less vulnerable than when you are compassionate and trying to understand.
Yet hate doesn’t completely explain that core group of loyalists around Trump, or not entirely. It doesn’t explain their willful blindness at his corruption, it doesn’t explain why they just do not seem to care about what he might have done to get where he is today.
I came to a realization while listening to a lawyer on the news comment on how much the Trump admin and their minions often sound like mobsters, use mob lingo and mob type threats. For the life of me, I’ve really struggled to wrap my head around what his loyalists find so attractive about that style of governing.
And then a name popped into my head – Jesse James – and then another – Billy The Kid, and then it all fell into place.
For the same reason, so many at the time followed the escapades of these outlaws and that so many still romanticize these characters of the old West, of taking what they want, ignoring the laws of the land, for some that kind of take-charge kind of power is very appealing. In a world where big box stores have made Main street U.S.A. a ghost town as globalization sweeps away so many traditionally secure jobs, and they watch immigrants doing better then they are, and that scares them.
They don’t mind Trump because they see him in much the same way as some saw Billy the Kid, Jesse James, Wild Bill Hickok and all those who just went out and took what they wanted and screw law and order.
And they don’t mind the crooks and corruption that hangs off that POTUS like toilet paper off his shoe cause it’s, to their mind, all victimless crimes. No one dies, no one is physically hurt and they get what they want. Their guy wins and liberals lose, and that is for them all that is important.
Or, so they believe.
The problem is in that hatred they missed the real boogeyman that snuck in with the riff-raff, missed the undercurrent at the heart, the undermining and weakening of America, and that the man they have pinned up as a hero has brought into the very heart of America, the Oval Office, those whose objective is not for the good of Americans, but rather for the weakening of America in order to gain that power for themselves.
They are blind, they just can not see that the man at the top of the food chain is not a hero, not a good guy in a white Stetson at all, but at the least an unqualified man who is over his head, or at the scariest, Individual 1 who knowingly conspired with foreign agents in order to secure himself the leader of the free world, and by extension now a puppet of Putin, maybe. This hatred and racism that has plagued America from day one is the Achilles heel, the very tool the real enemy used to gain power over Washington.
That is the thing about conman and mobsters and outlaws, is their allegiance is always only to themselves and everyone else is of no concern. They will say and do whatever it takes to get their own way, even allow the devil in the backdoor if that is what it takes, and even if their actions have serious consequences to everyone else, so be it, that is of no interest to them.
As we are all too familiar with now, as during this shutdown I watch as some government workers are forced to use food banks, get evicted from their apartment, and the powers that oversee all this think they can negotiate with their grocery store, take out a loan, have a garage sale, get a paper route, and the complete and utter disconnect these mobsters, conmen and outlaws have to those Americans who don’t have daddy’s money and massive wealth to fall back on, well I have no words.
Yet still there is this ignorant romanticization of this thug who sits in the White House, and the rule breaking and bending that has gone on is astounding, and for two years right under the GOP’s nose, as they looked away as their bank account balance filled up with monies from the NRA.
And just as I was almost finishing this post up, another of the Trumpian gang of outlaws has been arrested and charged with 7 counts, of lying and witness tampering, among other stuff, as Mueller captured another witch.
“What is evil? Killing is evil, lying is evil, slandering is evil, abuse is evil, gossip is evil, envy is evil, hatred is evil, to cling to false doctrine is evil; all these things are evil. And what is the root of evil? Desire is the root of evil, illusion is the root of evil.”
― Buddha
by PaulaB 