I stood beside my father's bed as he died. One of my kids nearly died as an infant. I stood and prayed with and for a woman dying before her kids were two. I find it's very easy to wish someone would die in the abstract and very hard to concretely wish it.
Wanting someone to die is possible only if
(1) you are a sociopath
(2) that person is directly responsible for an actual atrocity
(3) you are emotionally distraught
(4) you don't mean it
(5) you've never watched someone die and struggle to hold on to the end.
(1) you are a sociopath
(2) that person is directly responsible for an actual atrocity
(3) you are emotionally distraught
(4) you don't mean it
(5) you've never watched someone die and struggle to hold on to the end.
If you want your political opponents to die, and those political opponents have no actually perpetrated an atrocity -- reducing carbon emissions or refusing to reduce carbon emissions does not count -- you need to either be serious or you need to seek medical help.
To watch someone die -- to watch the color fade from his face, to watch his jaw and every muscle go slack as his head rolls to the side, to suddenly realize you don't hear or smell his breath any more -- is visceral and brutal in a way we don't see nearly as much these days.
Our political discourse is not brutal, it is jejune. It is now riddled with all of the signs of emotional adolescence carried on well past the point where one should have one's hormones under control.
It is not monstrous for most Americans who would do such a thing to wish death on their opponents because they are emotionally children who do not understand what they are wishing. It is infantile. And it is spreading.
Acting like a teenager is no better than listening to teenagers for policy advice: it is a mark of insufficient intellectual and emotional development that in a just world would deprive you of voting rights and the burden of jury duty at the very least.
We're probably screwed, though: Our elected officials have in far too many cases come to look like the electorate, and the feedback loop just reinforces the next round.
