a reply to:
carewemust
No... I do not think you can.
You cannot be a good father, if you harbour irrational hatred. Why do I say that? Because to harbour such things, unless you guard RIDICULOUSLY
carefully against spreading that hatred, means that it will pass from you to your offspring, something that no father ought to do, and be considered
"good", either as a man or a parent. I do not believe you can be a good husband while carrying hatred around with you, because hatred is toxic and
obsessive by nature, and the only thing with which a married person ought to be obsessed, is performing the role of husband to his spouse, the only
devotion he should have, is to that person he married, because otherwise he was not fit to marry in the first place.
I do not believe you can be a good employee, if you harbour hatred toward any potential segment of the customer base, or the rest of the workforce,
or the management, purely based on arbitrary and totally irrelevant factors like skin tone, religion, sexuality, gender, or any of the other metrics
by which people are routinely marginalised by the terminally witless. People are less likely to respond correctly to all customers with like
enthusiasm and level of service, if they actively despise a segment of society for no reason. And no, you cannot be a decent contributing member of
the society in which you live, if you carry around unreasonable and irrational loathing of any person or group thereof within that society, or hatred
for those living outside it. The reason I say this is simple. If you carry hate of the sort you are talking about within you, the chances are that at
some stage, that hatred is going to cause you to act irrationally, and when people do that, they remove value from society, they do not add it. They
cause division, damage cohesion, prevent unity and community from forming or damage what may already exist. Whether it is by that derisive glance as
they pass the target of their ire in the street, or by way of getting drunk and lashing out, or worse, allowing their mental affliction to grow to the
point where they snap and drive a car into a crowd of people, or take to the top of a tall tower with a powerful rifle and begin to simply kill those
they dislike, there is damage associated with having members of ones society, wandering about enraged in an irrational manner, with ones fellow human
beings.
Anger which has a source of reason and logic is legitimate. Disliking ones government because it systematically refuses to engage with the needs of
the people, choosing instead to inflate the wealth of those who have no need of it, choosing to kill indiscriminately in war, rather than choosing to
step back and away from conflicts it has no need to be a part of, is totally fair. Having a legitimate grievance with a particular political movement,
because it demonstrably damages your country by way of its existence (for example, White Supremacist or for that matter, radical religious groups of
pretty much any kind or origin), is absolutely legitimate.
But hating a group of people over irrational fear of them, allowing oneself to generalise to make hating easier, allowing oneself to become the worst
sort of person imaginable, simply because one has not the wit or the decency to learn past ones inadequacies, and come to a broader and wiser
understanding, not only of current affairs, but also history, is to render oneself an enemy of liberty, and in any country worth living in, that makes
one an enemy of the people as a whole, regardless of their race, religion, or politics. Good people do not harbour irrational hate.
It is the measure of a good person, that they be capable of loving their neighbour equally, regardless of their origins, that they be capable of
rational thought, have a rational mind more powerful than the lizard brain which is the amygdala, a mind immune to propaganda, and awareness of
history and its importance when navigating the present.
Without those things, what you have is a bad person, a person who is simply not very good at personhood, fails to understand it, or any of the things
which are vital to it. What you have there is a person who can say, and perhaps spell the word liberty, and while they may be able to spout chapter
and verse about its legal definition, can say nothing of what it actually means, without getting it horrifically wrong on every level. What you have
there is a person who believes that freedom of speech is equal to freedom from consequence and responsibility.
That is not what I would call a good person.