Tuesday, October 28, 2008

[POLITICS]
"If Obama Wins..." Redux

I've been thinking a lot about how to deal with this kind of...well, what passes for thinking. Should I be angry with them? More empathetic and understanding? The Christian thing to do would be to love them. But is that patronizing? From what little Nietzche I've read, I gleaned that he believed it to be disrespectful not to express anger.

In my better moments, I tend to favor appealing to people's better side. I also think the people in that video are straight-out terrified, and we have to understand that shouting at frightened people does not help.

But man. It's all well and good to empathize with ignorant, scared people – until they do damage. So at what point do we move from reaching out to shutting them down? Throughout our history their ilk have enabled more cynical, powerful people to do a terrific amount of damage. How do we stop it from continuing to happen?

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