OK. That's enough; this has GOT TO STOP

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[You might have guessed this, but the original post was written in a fit of hurried frustration, and many thoughts are hard to follow.  I’m going to try and clarify it as much as I can.]

I know I’m not the first one to notice this, but I’m one more person to get mad at what I’m seeing.  Of course everyone is angry at everything they see, especially when things in Britain go horribly awry.  Why?  Because though US politics is a lot more frustrating, many of us are accustomed to seeing more sanity and reason in Britain. What has happened?  Let’s first take a second to reflect on what we consider to be politeness.  As we understand it, it means that when something unpleasant is seen or heard, we simply keep our immediate negative reactions to it under wraps, and don’t blurt out in horror.  (For instance, in my case, I get really frustrated when I see a pregnant woman smoking.  The way I was brought up —and don’t get me wrong: my upbringing was fairly typical; that that’s the point— I just don’t go and yell at the woman.  Chances are, the woman already knows that smoking while pregnant harms the fetus, but has a compulsion to smoke nevertheless; I would be wasting my breath, and embarrassing the woman.  Evidently smokers consider themselves martyrs to their habit, and already deplore the fact that the occasional quick smoke is a must.)  Part of the deal is that we somehow go on to purge our anger at the distressing incident, and don’t let it fester inside us for a lifetime.  Of all the thought-habits we teach ourselves—and this one is almost definitely something that’s self-taught—this habit of grinding down our anger at whatever upset us, is probably the most important.  There’s a descriptive phrase for it that came out of the movie Frozen: Let It Go.

One writer, Maya Goodfellow, puts it like this:

One of Britain’s national myths is that it’s a tolerant and accepting nation. This simply isn’t true. To buy into that idea is to erase a history of hate: go back to the 1950s and 60s, when signs reading “No blacks, no Irish, no dogs” were stuck up in landlords’ windows, and people of colour were told to go home.

Britain has been an overtly racist and xenophobic country before, and those prejudices were, to some extent, put in a box and left to fester. Now we’re seeing the consequences.

Ms. Goodfellow goes on to analyze further, saying that the word tolerance implies putting up with something you don’t like.  It takes a lot more emotional work to grind down the dislike one initially feels to a level of what I would call true tolerance, which requires a significant amount of empathy, and other factors, including our personal experiences, such as becoming familiar with minority individuals and families, actually getting to know them well, and hearing their stories.

The vitriol—even when disguised as reasonable observation—coming out of Donald Trump makes his own constituents angry at the world.  It has the effect of releasing their suppressed feelings out of the “boxes” into which they (the feelings) might or might not have been stuffed.  This is the effect that Donald Trump desires; his strategy is to attract the sort of people who have felt pressured, thus far, not to display their hostility to minorities and blacks.  The remarks also make the rest of us angry, simply to watch Trump undermine in a few short months what decent people have been trying for decades to accomplish: to teach people that ethnicity has very few implications about the quality of a human being.  We’re finding out that the lesson was never learned, as Ms. Goodfellow implies: the resentment was simply driven underground.  So now, the Trump-ites wear their anger on their sleeves, and we’re frustrated at what’s happening.

But then, people who share my opinions and (broadly) my political and social values respond in kind.  You must have seen the vitriol coming out of liberal sources.  One fellow whose fB feed I receive is Brandon Weber, who friended me a couple of months ago.  To my frustration, some of the memes he posts are critical of the Right to the point of viciousness.  Now, of course a vicious post can be taken with some humor, and set aside.  And that’s pretty much what I have had to do.  But this spirit of philosophical fighting back is not the solution.  I’m probably guilty of the same offense, and now’s the time to be careful.  The best way, or rather the only way, to combat escalating rhetoric is systematic, relentless de-escalation.  You can’t fight fire with fire.  You can politely disagree; you don’t have to pretend to agree with whatever is being said.  But joining in a heated argument—certainly at this point in the game—will be counterproductive.  I have had the good example of dozens of people that I admire, who have never taken the bait in a shouting war, and I have missed it.  I made the mistake of thinking that they did not have ready ripostes.  No, they just buttoned their lips for the sole purpose of not alienating those on the other side permanently.

Bernie Sanders was very critical about everyone whom he viewed as opposing his campaign: both Donald Trump, and Hillary Clinton.  He was very angry, and very articulate.  I think he went just about as far as anyone should go, and one reason that I don’t put him in the same category as Donald Trump, in terms of inflammatory rhetoric, is that I agree with most of what he said!  Even the British agree with the thrust of Bernie Sanders’s claims, saying that the ambition of the Big Banks drove the world economy over the edge, and in the case of the Brits, the sector of society that the Big Banks serve—the extremely wealthy—are still trying to ride that cruel train that runs roughshod over the members of the poorer classes.  But I don’t see hate in Bernie’s speech, only indignation and determination.  When he talks about the Supreme Court, and the Congress and the Senate, we see something closer to hate, but it doesn’t quite cross the line.  It is the anger of the prophet.  Unfortunately that’s the problem with Bernie Sanders’s candidacy for President: a prophet seldom makes a good King.

Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, the twin British politicians who whipped up the population into voting for leaving the European Union, have both resigned.  Mercifully, we in the US were not subjected to the rhetoric that they generated, some of which was evidently racial.  If the British need someone at whom to vent their hostility, they’re a good target.  But Jeremy Corbyn, who represents those who are neither racist nor eager to leave the EU, steadfastly sticks to facts.  He criticizes relentlessly, but I’m yet to detect viciousness in his tone.

Hillary Clinton has been the target of an enormous proportion of the voting population.  She, if anyone, could be excused for shooting back.  But if you listen carefully, her speeches are seldom actually hate-inspired.  Obviously, she hates Trump, and criticizes him when she gets a chance.  But in side-by-side viciousness tests, Hillary is the soul of diplomacy compared to Donald.  Her opponents may think that she is spreading hate towards Trump with a honeyed tongue, but I don’t agree.  However, I seem to remember that some of what she said about Bernie Sanders bordered on the unreasonable.  If I were she, I would not have made such remarks.

Some of the memes (pictures circulated on the Internet) we are seeing are truly horrible, comparing Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump to zombies.   They presumably suggest that the Libertarians, under the leadership of Gary Johnson, have the best candidate this time around, but I just can’t bring myself to support a party that wants to privatize public education.

To return to my point, we must all teach ourselves and our children not only tolerance, but the wisdom to change our attitudes.  [This thought is so unclear, I cannot even now remember what I meant.  I believe I was thinking about racism and xenophobia specifically, but I may have been thinking about changing combative attitudes towards public debate to more civilized ones.]  Out there, far from the Halls of Education and Reason (which I say with tongue in cheek) are those who have successfully resisted the pressure to accept foreigners in their midst.  They must have said: well, if we have to have African Americans in our country, and now, an African president, too, and god knows whether he is a citizen, well, we’re willing to be civil, temporarily, but we don’t want them doing (x, whatever x is).  But we absolutely draw the line at Mexicans.  No sirree Bob.

I don’t think I have the skills to persuade anyone who is truly xenophobic, or is a died-in-the-wool racist, to give up his or her evil ways.  This post is aimed at those whose values are close to mine.  The big challenge, even before the challenge of clean energy and the environment and education and acceptance of LGBT and open restrooms and transportation and gun violence and narrowing the gap between rich and poor, is the de-escalation of our hate language.  Political discourse is grinding to a halt.  Those we’re electing to Congress and the State Houses, maybe even those who carry our political positions, seem to be also those who are willing to escalate the rhetoric.  Arguably, the young fellows coming forward to hold political office do not even know how to deal with verbal hostility with any sort of class.  The content of education now must have an important new component: How to deal with hate speech of all sorts with civility and reason.  In theory, dealing with hate speech was supposed to be a sort of by-product of the “broadening of the mind” that we all assumed took place in college.  But no; even professors today have such intense political feelings that they, too, indulge in thinly disguised hate speech.

Learning mere historical facts, and scientific methods is easy, compared with the difficulty of responding to absolute nonsense with some class.  In the past, college professors (and, to be sure, many high school teachers) were the one who taught this, without this skill being necessarily a recognized part of the curriculum.  But many faculty have either never realized that this was something they had to model, or have forgotten to model it.  It becomes incumbent, now, on every adult, to transcend the possible limitations of their educational experience, and show how it is done.  And the Internet should probably be one of the first lines of attack.  There is no silver bullet that will bring civil discourse back into the US tomorrow.  If we work at this, civil discourse may return someday in the distant future.

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