If you shame people for their pain by reminding them that “other people have it worse” you’re doing just one thing: You’re dismissing that pain as unworthy of compassion. You’re minimizing their situation and, by extension, you’re minimizing them. You’re sending them a message that you don’t really care. And if you send them that message, they’ll be less likely to care about you when you find yourself going through hard times. This is where compassion goes to die.
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I received an email from a blog reader the other day, and I was about to toss it aside when I reconsidered. I realized that it was a fascinating, if somewhat disturbing, insight into why some people follow Donald Trump.
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White supremacy denotes superiority. Domination. BLM just asserts that Black lives matter. … When one side wants to dominate the other, and the other side just wants to acknowledge the right to have a life (not even bothering to mention liberty and the pursuit of happiness), there’s no equivalency there — false or otherwise.
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Happy New Year to all my readers and everyone else on this spinning globe we share. May it be everything 2020 wasn’t, and more than we even imagine 2021 can be.
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Our problem is that we’d still rather spin our wheels with scapegoating and conspiracy theories than work together. Because we don’t trust each other. We’ve forgotten how to look for that spark of commonality in one another’s human eyes, and we’ve chosen instead to focus on how we’re different, and why we’re (supposedly) a threat to one another. Recognizing that spark won’t solve every problem. It’s just a beginning, and there will be a lot of work involved. But beginning is better than never trying.
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On June 16, 2015, Donald Trump rode a golden escalator down to the basement of Trump Tower to announce he was running for president. … He was behaving very much like a messiah coming down from heaven, descending from that sacred realm where the streets (if not the escalators) are paved in gold.
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