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View submission: Trump’s 60 Minutes interview once again reveals gross ignorance and wild dishonesty
I don’t want them to starve, and hopefully there is enough of what is good about America left to help them and their children have a better future.
This is exactly my main sentiment, here. And I do think it's important to hold fascists accountable, and I've had some pretty wild discussions on here about this and I was the one who was being firm on the fact that people like ICE agents should definitely be held accountable for the crimes against humanity that they've committed. But they have actively taken part in something in a more direct and traceable way than the average hypothetical Trump supporter. I've also just last night tried to explain to people how ridiculous it is for people on the right to act as if they are not actively antagonizing the existence of gay people, and that Mike Pence thinking that he can 'shock the gay away' is a clear attack on them that is well beyond anything that I would consider a 'difference in political opinion'. I can definitely agree there are many official GOP stances that I feel are just straight up attacks on all sorts of people; that they've constructed enemies out of people. But I refuse to see the average conservative voter as such, because doing so just slides us all further towards violence, death, and injustice. It gives these fuckers like Pence the power to define who is an enemy. Labels like that frame our thought, and where the people in power are what I certainly consider 'active' threats to our nations values, my conservative uncle is certainly not going to go out and start harassing, assaulting, or killing immigrants or gays. He is what I would consider a 'passive threat': he will vote for the GOP, but he's kind of simply not bright enough to realize what that actually means, nor necessarily believes that what is happening on the border is even real. I suspect that most conservatives are like him, but if we follow the logic that they are all enemies, suddenly I've conflated an active threat in power to a passive threat whose power is certainly not trivial, but is also not going out of their way to shit on the values of this country.
I think the situation with feeling bad for Germany after WWI is interesting. I don't think that feeling bad for them was what caused them to rise. I don't think of my stance towards Trump supporters as feeling 'bad' for them, so to speak. I think you're trying to say that my 'feeling bad' for them might be akin to letting your addict cousin use in your house because you don't want them to be out on the streets, but they are still shooting. I think that my way of feeling bad for them isn't quite like that; it's (at least in my head) more akin to a therapy session than it is a free pass (if only we could somehow force detox 30 million people of Faux News without blowing up our integrity...). What the other person was saying was more akin to a jail sentence, and we know that jail doesn't consistently rehabilitate addicts. It often reinforces their habits. Any kind of hatred or anger isn't just going to go away, and it certainly helps to have someone check your anger (because it blinds you), validate it as something real, but then proceed to question the validity of the unjustified *targets* of that anger. Anger is not a inherently bad thing; it is only bad when it is directed onto an unreasonable cause (like "the Mexicans taking our jobs! Lock 'em up!"). The Nazis needed someone to say 'okay, you have every right to feel this way, but absolutely *no* right to direct at these people who are objectively not responsible for your situation, and you will be held accountable for that regardless of how shitty your personal situation is, because you are making other people's situation infinitely more shitty, and that's clearly not fucking cool". That's just injustice.
Most of the time, it'll take a lot of work to have them see that. The policy I've come up with for myself, personally, is that it is *my* responsibility as someone who considers themselves (or at least tries) to be a just, moral, empathetic, liberty-valuing person is to make my best effort to see that any misguided anger (or policy, if we're talking to my tax-hating uncle) is transformed and redirected away from the people who are unjustly feeling the brunt of that anger (or policy). Not only because it is unjust, but because that anger just spawns more anger (I think it literally reproduces itself like some form of metaphysical life that 'lands' on us, but that's my own shit that I don't have totally figured out yet, and the effect is still clear regardless of how it actually works). If I cannot at least attempt that, with multiple approaches and tactics *before* labeling someone an enemy and grabbing my gun, I have completely lost my way and have let down both the great hearts that have guided me in the past and the poor souls of the future.
But if I simply cannot get through, and if they continually, actively go to rallies and associate with the alt-right or continue to be an open piece of shit *after* I've done my *personal* best at showing them *as an individual* how what they are doing is wrong (it is, after all, the only thing I can absolute control in this situation with any sort of integrity), I think the old Mattis quote (slightly modified) is perfect: "But I'm pleading with you, with tears in my eyes... if you fuck with the basic ideas of liberty and justice for all, I'll kill you all."
There's nothing here!