Foundational lesson rejected

One of the first things we were taught by parents and grandparents, then in kindergarten, is to respect others. It’s a variation on the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have done to you.”

With siblings and playmates and in school, it is an essential message of the socialization process. It’s a matter of considering how others feel and think. It’s about empathy and putting oneself in another’s shoes. It’s about sharing and kindness. It’s the way one manages to get along without undue conflict and strife. It could be considered elemental to living as civilized humans.

It seems terribly odd and incongruent, then, that one a group making up almost one entire party in both houses of Congress is dismissing the lessons they surely learned as small children.

On the far-right fringe, which now defines the Republican Party, they don’t believe in or apply the Golden Rule. They are not socialized to be considerate or to compromise. Empathy is to them a dirty word.

Psychologists know that one must respect oneself, first. That’s the real issue. On the extreme right, there is no self-respect. They believe people are inherently bad. “Original sin” is just a flawed theory that conflicts with science. But for them it is infallible truth and dogma.

Fascists, authoritarians, misogynists, white supremacists and Christian nationalists respect no one. They can tolerate no government with divided powers. Shut it down and burn it all down is their mantra. They must be defeated.

Robert Elliott, Las Vegas