Hating your enemies? It’s all been wasted time

Tommy Lasorda died Thursday night, and one of the first words that came to mind for me was “hate.”

But probably not in the way you think.

I’ll admit — for a good chunk of my life, I directed an unnatural level of anger toward the man. After all, I was a Giants fan, and if there’s anything Giants fans can agree on, it’s that we hate the Dodgers. And boy, did Tommy Lasorda epitomize the Dodgers.

This intense dislike, or whatever you want to call it, grew out of the late 1970s and most of the 1980s. The Dodgers were very, very good in those years. The Giants were usually very, very bad.

Even worse, the Dodgers knew they were good, to the point of being smug. They didn’t seem to appreciate all of that winning nearly enough to our title- challenged eyes — except for their manager, who enjoyed it way too much.

It was the perfect combination for the kind of hate that can only come from blind partisanship.

Lasorda played the role well. At Candlestick, where the visiting team’s clubhouse could be reached only by walking down the right-field foul line, he would greet the cacophony of boos and foul language by doffing his cap, blowing kisses to the crowd, bowing and basically doing everything he could to rile up the crowd. He was good at it, and he knew it.

He enjoyed it so much that when the Giants invited him back to do it one last time in their final Candlestick season in 1999, he accepted. He played it to the hilt, even grabbing the microphone to tell the crowd “You boo me because you hate yourselves.” Booooooooooooooo. Eventually, after he’d been retired a number of years and I’d gotten a lot older, my views about Lasorda changed. I came to view him more as a piece of baseball history guilty of nothing more than wearing the wrong color uniform — a great storyteller and fantastic ambassador for the game I love, even though I never stopped cursing the sight of him on my TV.

I changed in other ways too. Decades of sportsrelated arguments and trash-talking with friends lost its appeal. I knew I’d spent too much of my life angered by things fans of opposing sports teams said, and I’d spent too much of my time angering them. Eventually I lost my taste for it.

I also noticed politics were becoming a lot like sports.

Gone were the days you could have a civil conversation with your friends or coworkers if you dared disagree with them. Just as I hated spending Mondays in the office with Raiders fans in the 1990s if they’d beaten the 49ers on Sunday, suddenly you couldn’t discuss politics with anyone who held an opposing point of view. Especially on social media

Because, you know, if you voted for Donald Trump or George W. Bush, you were labeled as a racist, sexist, bigoted white supremacist who hated people of color and valued money more than life. (I know a lot of conservatives, and that sentence describes none of them.)

And, you know, if you supported Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, it meant you were an America-hating socialist freeloader who lived in your mom’s basement and wanted to tax working people out of existence. (I know a lot of liberals, and that sentence describes none of them.)

But the truth doesn’t matter. The most shrill, over-the-top, hate-filled voices from all sides refuse to let us see it any other way. They’re incapable of accepting the fact people are entitled to different opinions and sometimes in life, an election really does come down to voting for the lesser of two evils. Or even holding your nose and saying “I’m voting for this person because they support this one issue that’s most important to me.”

So the blind hate lingers, and intensifies. It’s no better, or logical, than saying “all 49ers fans sip white wine and eat cheese” or “Dodgers fans always show up in the third inning and leave in the sixth.” But it sure is a helluva lot more destructive.

We are so badly divided as a country I’ve almost lost hope. I never thought that day would come, but Wednesday’s carnage in Washington, and the reaction from extreme voices who never let the smoldering ruins of any catastrophe go to waste, have pushed my faith to the precipice. As always, the unhinged voices of some so- called “leaders” only add gasoline to the inferno.

Enough.

We need to find something to unite behind. We need to stop assuming everybody registered to a particular party is the stereotypical clone we have in our head, because they’re not. Every political party, like every fan base of a sports team, has extreme, god-awful lunatics on board who do a fantastic job of ruining the image for the rest of us. Some, as we’ve seen lately, are more dangerous than others.

But they’re a minority. Most of us are just regular human beings doing our very best to live, work and help our families through another day, and we do have a lot in common. Don’t let “leaders” or even “commentators” convince you otherwise.

I’m proposing a truly radical idea: Let’s concentrate on being good people. Let’s concentrate on being kind to one another and stop assuming the worst about others — it’s got to start somewhere, and it might as well start with us. And let’s stop spending so much time blaming others for our own unhappiness; blind partisanship, and group-think, are killing us faster than any actual enemy of our state could ever hope to do. We can’t control idiotic, maybe even treasonous actions by elected officials, but we can sure change the way we talk to (and about) each other afterward.

Ignorance-fueled hate is a damned waste of time. I see too much of it every day, and I’m sick to death of it.

I can’t believe it took Tommy Lasorda to help me learn that.