On a walk around a lake the other day this writer came upon a very young girl about 5 years old offering a look at her brown sort of tired dandelion to any walker coming by.  Her precious flower was the joy of the moment and she wanted to share it to all comers. Her mother stood by looking both happy and terrified at the example of this simple, generous, vulnerable love of life. I smiled and felt that warm feeling of hope that comes with children and the next generations. What kind of culture would offer the future of this generous young spirit a forced Sophie’s Choice of hating one path or hating the other path of humanity.  Only a devilish culture that lost touch with democracy and the prospect of love would require a loyalty test of hatred.

Our current political administration openly promotes hatred and revenge and the idea of crossing the aisle of conflict to promote a mutual resolution and peace is overtly defined as treason or disloyalty.  Our President has figured out one can recruit a fiercely loyal support constituency through the engineering of a  mutual hatred of any other way of thinking than his own. His blazing disrespect, and misleading statements about the opposing party, combined with a gift for bringing out the worst of his opponents defines political America today.  There is of course a short term strength in any strategy, of poisonous hatred but short term is the operational term here.  Hatred in the long term is a fatal weakness and right now the power and intelligence on planet earth is immigrating to more fruitful environments than the United States.  That is the bitter harvest of our indulging in mutual hatred as the default emotion of our political culture.  To close the loop I don’t want this child with the drooping much adored dandelion, when she reaches adulthood, to have to encounter the opposite of a good decision, which is what is on offer now; a Sophies Choice of mutual hatred engineered by a bedeviled political culture.

A modest proposal for good

A personality locked in hatred and addicted to revenge and retribution is a certain sign of arrested development and mental illness. I will not be so insipid as to propose: “vote for love this fall” but this much the Good Decision Project can urgently recommend; do not cast your vote for candidates who hate or show arrested development or who seek revenge. As they say, hatred is like poisoning yourself and hoping someone else dies. If you are opposed to being woke,all I ask is at least we all wake up. That would be good.