The Senate minority leader trailed off during a press conference and stared straight ahead for a few seconds as his fellow senators asked if he was OK.
These comments… goodness. May we never, ever lose our humanity. Ailment is not to be celebrated. That man has a family who loves him and are worried about him. I hope he gets the treatment he needs and is returned to good health.
While I severely doubt all that, you are right. It’s not good to celebrate suffering, even if someone has done so much wrong. That being said, I understand the urge to do so.
I won’t feel at all bad if he dies, but I won’t be cheering either.
I think you mean, “I hope he gets the treatment he has worked to deny to millions of other americans and then retires so we never have to see him again.”
(sorry, edited that. I was letting him off way too easy. Guy is single handedly responsible for holding up basically any and all progressive legislation for thepast… 10+ years and has definitely hurt millions of people as a result.) I don’t want to wish harm on anybody, but this dude sucks and needs to go away.
The good news is you DON’T need to wish harm on him in order to think he sucks and needs to go away. Yes, he sucks, but that’s irrelevant to his health. Celebrating the declining health of somebody because we don’t like them is a big line to cross on the path to becoming a callous ghoul. We need to be better than that.
If social media was around in the 1940’s I’m fairly sure I would not have lamented the declining health of Hitler. “He’s a man with a family! I’m sure he is scared and just wants to feel better.”
No thanks. Mitch McConnell spent his career enriching himself and hurting others. I don’t feel bad for him.
Maintaining a spirit of compassion and forgiveness in your thinking, even in the face of a monster, is positive. Wagging your finger and wrinkling your nose at the distaste that those who aren’t so forgiving of his absolutely horrific misdeeds is not. It pretends to be magnanimous while actually sniping at people who have good reason to be at peace with this man’s suffering.
I would argue that extending humanity to those who are less than perfect in their response to these horrors should be a higher priority than making sure nobody says anything nasty about someone as destructive as this particular individual.
I don’t agree with your assessment that I’m not “extending humanity to those who are less than perfect in their response.” It’s fine to want the guy out of office ASAP because he’s terrible. My point was simply that if one wants to maintain their own humanity, one should not celebrate the ailments of their enemies. Or, as Nietzsche said: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.”
Calling their humanity into question when they see the downfall of someone who’s oppressed them and are glad of it isn’t exactly an action rooted in empathy and understanding. Is it?
Of course overly indulging the ugly parts of ourselves can have disastrous consequences, but do you think it’s more ‘human’ to deny the very real justice people feel when they see powerful and malicious people fall?
Personally, I think a big part of having humanity for ourselves and one another is not beating ourselves up for being human. We have to have compassion for ourselves and for others who suffer as well as for our enemies. To me, that extends to not shitting on their revelry when Dorothy drops a house on somebody.
By being the brains behind the Republican party, he has done more to endanger the entire world via climate change than almost any other living person. That’s leaving aside the destruction of democracy in America and all the many, many, many individual ruined lives. He is quite literally multiple orders of magnitude more evil than the worst serial killer in history, and when he dies I will hold a massive party in which the house toilet is decorated to resemble his grave.
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These comments… goodness. May we never, ever lose our humanity. Ailment is not to be celebrated. That man has a family who loves him and are worried about him. I hope he gets the treatment he needs and is returned to good health.
While I severely doubt all that, you are right. It’s not good to celebrate suffering, even if someone has done so much wrong. That being said, I understand the urge to do so.
I won’t feel at all bad if he dies, but I won’t be cheering either.
I think you mean, “I hope he gets the treatment he has worked to deny to millions of other americans and then retires so we never have to see him again.”
(sorry, edited that. I was letting him off way too easy. Guy is single handedly responsible for holding up basically any and all progressive legislation for thepast… 10+ years and has definitely hurt millions of people as a result.) I don’t want to wish harm on anybody, but this dude sucks and needs to go away.
The good news is you DON’T need to wish harm on him in order to think he sucks and needs to go away. Yes, he sucks, but that’s irrelevant to his health. Celebrating the declining health of somebody because we don’t like them is a big line to cross on the path to becoming a callous ghoul. We need to be better than that.
If social media was around in the 1940’s I’m fairly sure I would not have lamented the declining health of Hitler. “He’s a man with a family! I’m sure he is scared and just wants to feel better.”
No thanks. Mitch McConnell spent his career enriching himself and hurting others. I don’t feel bad for him.
Maintaining a spirit of compassion and forgiveness in your thinking, even in the face of a monster, is positive. Wagging your finger and wrinkling your nose at the distaste that those who aren’t so forgiving of his absolutely horrific misdeeds is not. It pretends to be magnanimous while actually sniping at people who have good reason to be at peace with this man’s suffering.
I would argue that extending humanity to those who are less than perfect in their response to these horrors should be a higher priority than making sure nobody says anything nasty about someone as destructive as this particular individual.
I don’t agree with your assessment that I’m not “extending humanity to those who are less than perfect in their response.” It’s fine to want the guy out of office ASAP because he’s terrible. My point was simply that if one wants to maintain their own humanity, one should not celebrate the ailments of their enemies. Or, as Nietzsche said: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.”
Calling their humanity into question when they see the downfall of someone who’s oppressed them and are glad of it isn’t exactly an action rooted in empathy and understanding. Is it?
Of course overly indulging the ugly parts of ourselves can have disastrous consequences, but do you think it’s more ‘human’ to deny the very real justice people feel when they see powerful and malicious people fall?
Personally, I think a big part of having humanity for ourselves and one another is not beating ourselves up for being human. We have to have compassion for ourselves and for others who suffer as well as for our enemies. To me, that extends to not shitting on their revelry when Dorothy drops a house on somebody.
By being the brains behind the Republican party, he has done more to endanger the entire world via climate change than almost any other living person. That’s leaving aside the destruction of democracy in America and all the many, many, many individual ruined lives. He is quite literally multiple orders of magnitude more evil than the worst serial killer in history, and when he dies I will hold a massive party in which the house toilet is decorated to resemble his grave.