Today if you stick your foot in it, you can just delete it. Learning social media over the last few years, I have been so thankful for one friend in particular who has warned me about things I wrote and hadn’t realized had come out terribly wrong. And she was the first to use Snopes for every post she read, long before the word got around that Facebook and others quickly went belly up for accuracy and reality.
But the hate was spread nonetheless, and the right wing won hands down, I would say. Blame those of us who held to and loved Bernie and blame Debbie and Donna for their thumbs on the scale of the voters’ hearts – which did not work.
I can’t believe how quickly the “hate” re-spread across the county — many countries for that matter — with “let’s get off into groups and be enemies.” Like someone yelling fire in a crowded theater. It should have been against the law to turn people against each other even worse than they were before. But I don’t see the left coming up as any kind of champions to encourage unity and harmony.
Lots of whites who knew me from my early years, knew I had open love in my heart for all people, no matter their color or religion. My bigot-surrounded world was not a joke, it just was. Some percentage of my influential forebears were rank, evil, bigoted jerks. They showed me that they hated some group of people – either for religion or color or race or something – and they would hate me for not sharing their hate.
I got in a lot of trouble once for taking an African American neighbor girl with our group of children for trick or treating. A stop was put to that! I had to apologize quickly for being so thoughtless and take the girl home. On the way I was shaking and crying over and over, telling the girl I was so sorry that person had yelled things like “…not in my neighborhood…” etc etc.
My great aunt used to describe how her 1st husband who died in the great Flu of 1918, had gotten her a gun and taught her how to use it to protect herself. She described how she pulled it on a black man coming down the road at one point, saying to him she would shoot him if he didn’t go on. Poor man, I bet he was so relieved he got away from her alive.
Today, the same hate fills the digital messaging from some people, while the rest share glittery flowers and cats and puppies. (I am a sucker for the puppy ones myself, all the cute animals.)
I wonder about the survival of the fittest and all the anger toward each other. Where did this one-group-hates-another-group start? Over and again, I read all the wondrous DNA studies, as more and more sequencing pushes the limits of our knowledge about ourselves. The indications are we have been feeling, loving, and hurting beings for hundreds of thousands of years, back in time farther and farther.
I read about extinctions and what we are doing to the planet, but also about saber tooth tigers. And I’ll bet early man tried to kill every last one they could get their hands on. Did someone at one time worship the cat and get mad at the families trying to protect themselves against that cat?
Is that how hate arose?
In one episode of Lost in Space, a pill they tested on a robot created hate. Will there be a gene fix to alter the future for people?
(Controversial deleted one-minute scene from Lost in Space: From Lost in Space episode ‘A Change of Space’ – Season 1 Episode 28. Aired April 1966. Audio from the 1995 game ‘I have no Mouth, and I must Scream” by The Dreamers Guild.)
If there was a pill for something, folks would not be able to afford it. The big pharmaceutical companies would sell it to rich men to make their wives more pleasant to their liking. oops. Move on.
The love pill would never be used on the masses because then they would not be willing go fight and kill the people they are supposed to hate and get killed themselves. Got to keep the folks ready to fight so one can reduce the surplus population on a regular basis. Same thing for a fix in the genes to make people nicer to each other – this would not likely be of use to the rich folks making lots of money on everything human — even the garbage. And certainly war.
I wonder if we can be nice. If threatened would we, any humans, not try to fight tooth and nail to survive when we have to – or in the case of some predators, where we know we would be defeated, would we just run or stay and commit surrender suicide?
This antelope gives birth and then a leopard pounces and the mother runs leaving the baby behind.
(Incredibly rare and unbelievable video of an impala giving birth, only to lose her newborn lamb to a leopard moments later.)
In archaeology, we read of sites that are thousands of years old and when they excavate they find walls around the community. Whatever kind of living structures the people might have had, the site was surrounded by walls.
If we think, hope folks are going to get along, we are fooling ourselves. Even the famous walls of Jericho 10,000 YBP tell us humans built walls to protect themselves and their families, and the story tells us why. They are still needed today.
Oldest.org tells us about the oldest walls and the experts suggest this or that wall could have been built to protect against cold winds. But my curiosity makes me wonder if it was also protection from humans. The Stone Wall at Theopetra Cave, near Kalambaka, Thessaly, Greece is said to be 23,000 YBP. Seeing the life of the impala, I’ll bet mankind and womankind have built protective walls from the beginning. Only then could they try to delete the threats – like saber tooth tigers and Twitter.
For this time of political campaigning – both sides exhaust me with rhetoric. Both sides seem to call for war. Maybe on the government stage this is OK, but all politicians have left us folks behind, quaking in our boots. We need the grassroots love; stick the fund-raising up yours.
The fears grow. The hate grows. Walls up, and watching the Weather Channel.
Deleting my own politics – Vote for Puppies.
A wee 45 second video from 2012 of a cute dog voting – sort of.
And some amazing information about education in Denmark where the students are learning about empathy: A compulsory subject of study which is taught an hour a week in the “Klassens tid”, where students learn to help their classmates and compete only with themselves”
Marionetta Strung-Out 