We should be kind to the cruel

NEIL Mackay asks near the end of his article (“Schadenfreude and karma are one thing – wishing Trump dead quite another”, The Herald, October 6): isn’t it morally wrong to reward cruelty with kindness? He admits that there is a darkness in all of our hearts but we have the power to stop ourselves acting on our worst instincts. I thought he was going to continue by giving us a rehash of the Sermon on the Mount.

Why is Mr Mackay even asking this question? He quotes our grandmothers’ wisdom – if you can’t find anything nice to say about someone don’t say anything at all. Our grandmothers, however, would have absorbed this reactive attitude by having been taught the proactive wisdom of the Sermon on the Mount at school or Sunday school: love your enemies (even the enemies in your heart), do good to those who hate you.. do unto others what you would like done to yourselves (Matthew chapters 5-7).

Even if they didn’t actually succeed in doing good to those who hated them, they would know better than to ask a question about rewarding cruelty with kindness. They knew it was an ethic to aspire to even if success in doing this was a struggle.

So it is actually morally right to reward cruelty with kindness. Grandmothers may not all pass down this wisdom and if we don’t take our own point of reference from the moral code of the Bible then we make up our own standards and may pander to those worst instincts which Mr Mackay wishes us to stop acting on. If we only love those who love us and do not aim to be kind to the cruel we are then no different from those animals which Neil reckons we are elevated above. Irene Munro (ordained local minister, Ross Presbytery), Conon Bridge.