the complexities of human nature?

". . . And then he realized why he was thinking like this.
It was because he wanted there to be conspirators. It was much better to imagine men in some smoky room somewhere, made mad and cynical by privilege and power, plotting over brandy. You had to cling to this sort of image, because if you didn't you might have to face the fact that bad things happened because ordinary people, the kind who brushed the dog and told their children bedtime stories, were capable of going out and doing horrible things to other ordinary people. It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was Us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things."

TERRY PRACHETT
Jingo

A. was telling us yesterday about a documentary on Obama she had watched recently. It portrayed him as a family man, wholly human, chivalric and compassionate, overcoming odds. . . someone whom you could respect and admire, maybe even love. But wasn't Bush, for all his war-mongering, an old fashioned, Texan family man too? And yet . . . it's so difficult for me to imagine -- if only for a moment -- for someone like him, someone whom I revile with all of my heart, to be capable of appreciating familial warmth, of being able to exhibit any kind of compassion...

It's so easy for us to vilify those inhumane, callous Israeli "bastards," those who exemplify "evil," as it were, who would perpetrate such catastrophic violence, inflict such acute suffering upon innocent people . . . We dehumanize them, in effect, and as such, it is almost impossible for us to imagine them in the most tender of situations -- singing a lullaby to their children before putting them to bed at night, for example, taking care of their aging mothers...

1994 in Rwanda, you had neighbors, deeply-cherished family friends -- ordinary people -- pick up machetes, break bonds, turn against each other and hack people to death. A rather unnerving paradox, which causes your heart to recoil into its depths in disbelief...

And then this lends itself to the "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" question. The idea that the "evil" leaders of the world don't necessarily see themselves as perpetrating evil -- they see themselves as being in the right. What is base and morally corrupt, is such a malleable social construct. One of the things I hated the most about Bush's rhetoric, is how arrogantly/ignorantly he would pontificate about "us" vs. "them," "good" vs. "evil"; how easy it was for him to simplify such complicated, amorphous concepts. . . & Yet, I find myself doing the same when I judge people who are of different political leanings than I am.