Mean-spirited trend in the air

Have you noticed just how mean-spirited people can be against each other? It is as though the world belongs to them and others are merely interfering in “their living zone.”

You see this behavior quite frequently on the roadways. People are very rude and inconsiderate to their fellow travelers. Don’t let them be late going where they’re headed; you become just another casualty to them like a bug splashing on their windshield.

The way people interact with each other in general has gotten to be very inconsiderate. They appear to have very little compassion for each other.
  

Don’t happen to have an opinion about politics because if you fall on the wrong side of the political equation you are dog meat. Republicans hate Democrats and vice verso. The right hates the left. The moderates hate the liberals. They don’t just modestly disagree with them, but express really deed-seated hatred.

When George W. Bush was in office you had the Bush-Haters. Now that Obama is in office we have the Obama-haters. This hatred is not just about their character, at least not in all cases, but more about them representing “the enemy.”
 

As if that wasn’t unusual enough just take a look at the institutions that are suppose to teach us how to love one another, the religious community. Christians hate Muslims, Catholics hate Protestants, so many believers hate the Jews, some Buddhist think people who believe in a divine entity are off-base, and if you practice something other than the beholder, you become a heathen. So much about God and love!

Somehow it appears that we are drifting away from any reasonable sense of basic morality. No one wants to be told what or how to think. Even more importantly they demonize you if you think differently from them.

There is no respect for others who are different. There is no tolerance for disagreement. People feel entitled to be jerks (a-holes), even though they refuse to admit to being one. This sense of entitlement only covers the self and whatever cronies are sucked into their mindset, but everyone else is the enemy.
 

You would think that people who generate such mean-spirited demeanor would look into a mirror and actually see fumes and flames shooting out of their nostrils with horns extruding out of their skulls like a wild ferocious bull.

The truth is they cannot see themselves, even if they could see they still would feel justified in being what they are. A small percentage of them see exactly what they have become and don’t care what others may think about them.

Where is this dark spirit coming from?

Part of it is conditioning, indoctrination, poor or inadequate parenting, lack of moral boundaries, selfishness, false-pride, and just basically lack of respect for others.

When one has basic respect they could genuinely disagree with others and walk away in disagreement. You realize that people are free to have their opinions and/or beliefs even if they differ from yours. You also realize that your particular parameters from which you assess judgment are different from others.

When respect is not genuinely offered is it really deserved? In other words, if it does not come from you, perhaps it is not in you. So, neither do it belong to you… respect that is.

Another issue is entitlement. If different parties feel equally justified for their stands, in their mind’s eye, they feel entitled. However, if they don’t respect others, to them they are the only ones entitled so therefore others become intruders or otherwise “the enemy.”
 

There is no real justification for being mean-spirited. It pulls from the bottom of the list of human behaviors. It is like scrapping from the bottom of the barrel where only leftover settlements are gathered.

Such people either don’t know or don’t care about who they harm. Like a bug smashed on a windshield there is no feeling, no compassion, or no thought about others.

There is absolutely no justification for such human behavior. Of course, there are some that would totally disagree with this assessment. We have to learn to live with that fact! 

Shoe on the other foot

I find it interesting how I boldly state my own opinions and yet become so easily agitated when others state theirs. In a similar way I pull so hard for my team to win that I almost blindly refuse to see that the other team also has supporters. Are we becoming so competitive that we refuse to see the other point of view?

I find myself writing about this subject quite often. It is because I really need to hold myself back a bit from taking such strong stands about certain things, so much so that it has gotten to the point that I refuse to even look at another's point of view.

Many wars are started for this very reason. People become so blinded by their personal view of things that they refuse to even consider the views of others. Family feuds often begin just like this.  Siblings or even best friends will break up, at times for life, because of this blindness. If we aren’t careful we will find ourselves so rigid that no one can penetrate through our thick shells of selfishness.

As a sport’s fan living in the LA area I had to almost stop watching the Lakers because it seems that just when I watched a game they would lose to a team that they were supposed to blow away. I would become furious at them!

When you stop to think about it they are the current two-time champions of the NBA and personally each one of them are financially doing well. Why should I become so stressed out about them losing some games when at the end of the day they will go home to their mansions (or wherever) and I end up seething in my stress and sorrow in my little house. Stress can kill, so I am told!

When my neighbors do things differently than what I am accustomed to seeing it irritates me no end.  It is not that they are bad people, just the fact that they are different. Why should that irritate me? In truth there is nothing about their behavior that is wrong except for the fact that they are acting differently from the way I am used to seeing things done. I really have no right to be upset, but this eruption seems to come from somewhere deep in my gut.

In spousal or long-term partnerships inevitably one party will do something that is different from the other and it irritates them no end. In truth there is nothing wrong with how others do things except for the fact that they are different from another's expectations. Why should that be so upsetting?

Since this tension seem to rise out of our guts so often and they concern so many different situations and circumstances then perhaps each of us needs to back ourselves up a bit and see if we are able to determine from where this gut feeling is emanating.

Competition can become a healthy motivation, but once we become so blinded by our own immutable point of view that we refuse to accept the views of others we need to check something in our personalities. We need to make sure the person that we see in the mirror each day is not primary one causing the problems.

Understanding this to be true of me I decided to take a deeper look at how I judge things. Lately I purposefully take the need to be right or to win out of the equation for a while so I could see just how blind I had become to my own selfish attitude.

When being right or winning was not the only goal the results did not stress me out as much. I actually learned that the point of view of others was even quite interesting at times, and I broadened my own horizons by trying to understand the other's viewpoint.

Obviously we can’t always practice this exercise but when possible give it a try and you will be amazed at how the shoe fits and or feels when it is on the other foot. The only requirement is that you will have to reduce the size of your ego, at least momentarily, in order for this practice to work in all sincerity.

Give it a try, it might show you something about yourself where you had become partially or totally blinded. – Pearls of Wisdom.