Here's a little something I think we should all keep in mind....

"Those who are enemies do not in fact cease to be men."

Hugo Grotius

 "On Good Faith Between Enemies"

Read it this morning in A History of Philosophy (page 333 of Volume III, which makes it page 1,485). It's a pretty perfect sentence, isn't it? As Chris Hedges just pointed out in the part of Death of the Liberal Class that I read yesterday, demonization of the enemy is one of the ways tyrannies gain their foothold in your soul. (Because once you're convinced that a demon is sniffing your trail, you'll put up with all kinds of shit.) And it really, really works. 

But we do this in our daily lives as well, don't we? Racism, misogyny,  political contempt, hatred of your ex- . . . it's all the same. We amplify our hatred by turning the opponent into a lense, disregarding all aspects of his being except for that which we hate.

And that's just not what we're here for.

You know, a week ago that would have been a Tweet. Just the quote and 280 - 102 = 178 letters and spaces for commentary. (Which would have been enough to tell you what page the quote was on in A History of Philosophy and how I was reading a line in a Chris Hedges book which dovetailed with it, and the book was called OOPS OUT OF ROOM.) And a Tweet would've had more readers than this blog entry will garner, for sure, but the thought would have been truncated--even though it's pretty brief as is--and I'm sure that that's less good. Maybe the worst aspect of Twitter is not that you express yourself so "cogently," but that you begin to think that way. The platform itself is kind of like a sense . . . .

Heh, cogently. Twitter is the opposite of gentle most of the time in my experience.