a long-winded Post-(Post)-Script

My post below (admittedly kinda over-the-top, even for me) is making me think about the nature of hatred, and fear, and intolerance, and racism, and all of the other negative -isms.

Some thoughts:

1) I can thank those generations of students for my healthy liver function and relative lack of facial wrinkles.

2) When one particular group of people has caused problems for you over the course of many years (or, as in the case of the Middle East, since the beginning of recorded time), it becomes easy to understand how hatred and misunderstanding can arise, and become cemented into a culture, or into a person's heart. And it's difficult (as that person) to not want to retaliate. I certainly retaliated against those students; in elementary school, I spent hours cleaning student-generated garbage off my street, and dumping it in piles on their porches. I felt bad about it, but I thought (in my elementary-school-aged logic) that it was what they deserved, and that it might teach them a lesson, get them to think about what they were doing. Of course, it probably just pissed them off, and made them more likely to deliberately throw their beer cans on the ground. Vengeance (as much as I love that movie) does not help anyone, and indeed only succeeds in widening the gaps between people.

3) In the same vein, I’ve found that approaching someone in anger [about a problem], or even with the self-righteous intention of ‘teaching them a lesson’ or 'helping them to be more self-aware', is much less productive than approaching them in love, and also ends up feeling pretty crappy. At first, there's a sense of exhilaration; the relief of having gotten something off your chest. But then (for me, at least) it quickly sours, often becoming a feeling of embarrassment at having exposed my own negative emotions and lack of control so publicly. And it usually makes the other person feel pretty crappy about themselves too, and often defensive or hurt (and therefore completely closed to the possibility of having any kind of personal revelation or positive learning experience).

Here endeth… today's sequence of fever-induced thoughts.