As of late I'm beginning to form another opinion about the supporters. Base on my observation the level of rabidness displayed doesn't fit well in my initial reasoning of kindship. Where people support the side they felt an emotional kindred to. Then there is the reasoning of morality which also doesn't exactly fit nicely into the displays shown. Because comparable events elsewhere don't illicit the same level of rabidness that's bordering vitriolic. That is not to say there are no people who place their support base on these two reasonings alone. It is just the numbers and intensity don't add up.
So I opine that there is another element in combination to the earlier reasons at play here. And that is hatred. With this new element things started to fit more tightly into what I observed. Like why so many people are heated to support a group of people yet have little interest with another group of people who share the same common hardship - in this case war & arm conflict.
It is because the other groups of people doesn't have the same antagonist as their supported group. The hatred towards the perceived antagonist amplifies the kindship reasoning and also brings about the level of vitriol observed. Without the same antagonist, the other groups don't enjoy the same level of rabid support. Same goes for the morality reasoning. Where we can only observe rabid support when there is hatred towards the antagonist group. The same kind of rabid support will not be seen when the same antagonist group is not present in another similar conflict elsewhere.
I certainly can't disagree with you, but I also can't help but wonder if this isn't a case where we've allowed the most fervent and vitriolic among us to drive the public discourse, and with it both the perception of human acrimony and the course of human actions. Part of me wants to believe that the majority of people are rational and levelheaded. The fact that the Israel-Hamas war hasn't expanded further at least gives me some hope that this is indeed the case. It could've easily spiraled into something much worse.
I realize that sometimes optimism is hard to justify through times of seemingly rampant turmoil. But if the levelheaded among us will simply remain so, then this too shall pass. It's just human nature, some of us are highly emotional and impassioned beings, prone to overreacting, and some of us aren't. The hope is that the better reasoning of the levelheaded people will eventually mollify the rabidity of the fervent people. Or we'll all die in the process. Either way it should be quite entertaining, and not anything to be overly concerned about... life goes on.
Yes the world is a chaotic, violent, and ungodly place, but there's nothing wrong with that. It's just people being people. They are the way they are, because life has to find a way to carry on, and that doesn't always involve sunshine and Mary Poppins. Still it's an amazing thing, and the 'better' of us will hopefully outlast the 'worse' of us... whatever that means, and we'll eventually look back on this as just life doing life.
But what this means for me here and now is that I can accept people for what they are... they're just people... doing the types of things that people have always done, seemingly in vastly more egregious ways, but not really. In the meantime, you do you... I'll do me... and we'll let the other guy do the other guy... and then tomorrow we'll get up and do it again, until the day comes when we don't get up anymore. Then hopefully we get a thumbs up from the Big Guy and a slap on the back for a job well done.
And voila... we didn't kill everybody.
If we are honest with ourselves, we would know that none of us are truly capable of unbias empathy.
Ehhhhh, I don't know, I'm pretty darn close. When I was younger I used to spend a lot of time downtown, where business people and professionals intermingled with homeless people, and drug addicts. After a while you come to realize that they're all just people trying to get from one day to the next. I could use some 'holier than thou' principles to judge this person vs that person, but I really didn't have the right to do that. I was just somebody sitting there watching... with no God given right to judge anybody.
So you learn to accept them... all of them. And better or worse barely matters... being human matters... and the words "
the least of these' matter. Now you may be right and none of us are truly capable of unbiased empathy, but we can hope that we are, and we can try to be.
The first step is to realize that people are just people. Some of them are kind, and generous, and forgiving, and compassionate... and some them aren't... some of them are lost, and scared, and angry, and selfish... but they're still just people. In the end what matters isn't what they do, what matters is what you do. And as Micah 6:8 says, "
Do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God."
Well that was certainly preachy... sorry.
