Wednesday, November 2, 2016

The Unhappy Warriors

I've been noticing recently, in this most odd of political years, that there are people who are highly intelligent, but with no deep moorings, but who are political nonetheless and avidly so, and are also truly massively unhappy people.

It's been interesting.

Some of these folks build their unhappiness into outright hatred, often of the people they oppose, but in part simply because those folks are both happy and deeply devoted to something.

And I'm not pointing figures at the right or the left. They are fully, equally, guilty.

I'm also not claiming that being ardent and vocal in your politics puts you in this category.  Not by a long shot.  Probably most really political people love their country and the people in it, and aren't in a mental space of deep despair and deep detestation.

But some people truly are.

Indeed one person I somewhat know and have watched this season is an adherent of the far left.  In watching, they seem to me, more than anything, in a state of profound loss, with a life that has not gone where it seemed that it should, that's somehow turned a leftward bent into one of true loathing.

That's just sad.

And again, that isn't a thing of the right or the left.  There are people on the right and the left like that.  Indeed it was Jean Shepherd, the radio personality and writer with a keen wit who is now, perhaps, ironically remembered mostly for the movie A Christmas Story who observed that true fanatics circled back around and met each other, making a fanatic of the right and a fanatic of the left very little different.

Which might be cause for fanatics to reconsider.

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