I am not a social media-heavy person, to say the least. (Shocker!) However, I got back on Teh Facebook not too long ago. I troll my friends' feeds, and was doing so today when I came across some pretty sad comments.
Backstory: my friend served overseas in Iraq. Many of the subsequent comments to her post are from fellow armed services veterans.
This is so sad. These are people, human beings, on both sides of the fence here, and it is too easy to forget that in the pervasive Us vs. Them ideology. "They" are the enemy. "They" should be denigrated. "They" should be, essentially, taken out back and shot. These thoughts exist on either side of the Us vs. Them equation. US veteran or civilian, Muslim or non-Muslim - these were all once precious, innocent children, individuals who had their paths in life spread like an open canvas in front of them. Somewhere along the line, that canvas became colored - whether by violence, acts of hate, or constant threats to self and loved ones - and this meanness (not just unkind or vicious, but ignoble) is what now obliterates a once-promising life's work. All because of sociopolitical and religious intolerance. Ignorance. They are essentially the same thing. Sad, sad, sad. That we have the beautiful cultures and blessings of intelligence and empathy and compassion, and yet we squander those to baser, coarse, destructive attitudes of the myopically narrow-minded.
The most scary part is thought dictates action. If you allow hateful thoughts to occupy your head, you will behave hatefully. You may tell yourself that you don't really believe x, y, or z, but if your unvarnished thoughts are x, y, or z, then you can guess where I would put my money on your behavior when push comes to shove.
Nobody is right here. It is all wrong.
* Fyodor Dostoevsky - maybe from The Brothers Karamazov? Many also attribute this quote to Dostoyevsky and cite "unknown source."
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