Something to Contemplate: Hate and its costs

Hate is too great a burden to bear. It injures the hater more than it injures the hated.” Coretta Scott King

It is easy to hate and it is difficult to love. This is how the whole scheme of things works. All good things are difficult to achieve; and bad things are very easy to get." Rene Descartes

“...Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.” Stephen King

Love blinds us to faults, hatred to virtues.

A recent Fox News poll gets at the disturbing truth: A majority of Democrats say they want to see the president fail. Such deep hatred is bad news for the country at a time when America needs to bridge the partisan divide. It's also bad news for the Democrats, who risk repeating the Republicans' mistakes of a decade ago, driving away the centrists they need to regain power or going too far if they do manage to win.

Fox's question was revealing: "Regardless of how you voted in the presidential election, would you say you want President Bush to succeed or not?" Democrats said "not," 51 percent to 40 percent - where the public at large wanted success by almost two to one.

In other words, the rage extends way beyond the lip-pierced Deaniacs, aging hippies and other fringes of the Democratic Party. Lots of otherwise sensible people - suburban moms, hospital orderlies, schoolteachers, big-hatted church ladies - detest George W. Bush.

When these Democrats say they want Bush to fail, might this mean that they simply reject what they see as his far-right religious and corporate agenda? If so, it's hard to see why independents - hardly right-wing zealots - hope he succeeds by 63 percent to 34 percent. Sadly, much of the Democratic Party wants to see this president crash and burn.

In fact, the fury against to Bush has reached unprecedented levels, even compared to the animosity among Republicans to his predecessor. Not long ago, a Washington Post-ABC News poll found that "strong disapproval" of Bush was 10 points higher than that recorded for Bill Clinton at any point during his presidency, including his impeachment. (That wasn't during a war, either.)

Of course, Bush and the Republicans have helped stoke the anger with their own hardball partisanship under Clinton and during this presidency. And there is plenty in Bush's record that a loyal opposition can legitimately criticize.

Yet if Bush does fail - for instance, if Iraq spirals into civil war or the economy slides into recession - then America is in trouble. Making progress on these key issues, like others facing the country, will require bipartisan solutions, not political finger-pointing. (source) Craig Charney

It is possible that between the hate outside focused in on us, and the hate inside focused at our national heart, we will fall. And that, from my POV, will be a sad day, for it means a great experiment that tried to balance the forces will pull groups apart with that which pull groups together failed. And in its failure, much hope about how humans can live together in freedom will go down the drain.