Walking down the stree the other day, I spotted a car window's endorsement for this election year.

     There exists a set of people who habor a dislike of President Trump. A subset of such people have a wrongheaded habit of transferring their hatrad of Trump toward those who support Trump. Jingoism and  patriotism are the supporting roots for global division. Such practice is not unique nor limited to the political domain. Hating the other side is found in almost everything from sports and cinema celebrities to genre fandom and philosophical disagreements. I remember, even today, the charged venomous I had toward my rival school while attending my undergraduate alma mater rally the nigth before the annual Big Game. The feel and atmosphere resembled the minute Hate assembly depicted in Orwell’s 1984. Instead of Goldstein, we were hating the Farm.

      The animosity generates within us the delusional idea that nothing good can be found in the other side. ‘They’ are throughly evil. ‘They’ must be expunged from the face of the earth for the betterment of all. “We” are the good guys. “We” are on the [proverbial] right side of history. 

     None of which is true or factual. I shan’t digress into making the ‘a bad person can do good deeds’ argument. (By the way, I am sick of seeing the anti-hero trope; both in the trope’s name and trite use of character.) Let me leap ahead to the crux of this blog post.

     The true measure of tolerance is being open-minded at entertaining the possibility that those with whom we disagree or downright hate, for whatever reasons, may possess good qualities unapparent to us. For example, that junior college in Palo Alto — pains me to admit, may be an good OK school.

     The driver of the vehicle advertising their support for Trump/Pence is a regular volunteer who at the moment was dropping off supplies to the town’s community day center that caters to the homeless population. Before anyone dismisses their charity activity as some recent habit adopted out of guilt, they have been a doing such long before Trump’s inauguration and during Obama’s tenure as president.