I’m super-liberal and super-privileged, so I’ve got the luxury of trying to muster empathy for these shitstains, and I can, and this is how it happens. I kind of can understand that. Getting caught up with the group. Not acting “like yourself” in a crowd. Struggling with the cognitive dissonance. Hell, we’ve all been there, most of us probably just haven’t pointed a fucking gun at a kid’s birthday party while being exorbitantly racist about it. I can see that under different circumstances, with a different life, and a different mind, that wouldn’t be impossible.
I think the most important antidote is to realize that yes, that was you, that sometimes you can be an awful person, that sometimes everyone can be an awful person, and that this doesn’t make it OK, it just means that if you see a person being awful that maybe there but for the grace of God go all of us. This helps you to try not to be so awful, to know that it’s always a struggle to not be awful, and to be more forgiving of others who are awful.
The fact that these people haven’t quite realized that lesson, even after all this speaks to the pernicious effects of internalized puritanical Protestant morality, where being a “good person” is so fragile and so vital that you cannot accept the idea that you did something horrible. Better to create another person, a “crazy version” of yourself, one that can be flawed, that you can try and dissociate from.
That attempt to rationalize away the behavior will never be successful in ending it.
(As an aside, please don’t read my reaction as saying that everyone should have empathy for these people. I’m not here to tell anyone else how to react, so please continue your schadenfreude or whatever works for you. Having empathy for these assholes is something I can do, so I will, but that’s just me.)
