REVENGE
Today I read an on line interview with James Kimmel about his new book, Revenge, The World’s Deadliest Addiction—and How to Overcome It. In it he argues that when we feel we have been harmed or threatened by someone it triggers not only a deep desire to get back at them, but that the yearning for revenge and the act of getting revenge results in a kind of high in which we disregard tha harm that revenge will do to the other person or even the way it might hurt us because the drive to get revenge is so strong and so stimulating. But he goes further to claim that this high brought on by revenge can become an addiction. Achieving the high of revenge may then bring a low which can only be escaped by more revenge and the high that comes with it. It is possible to get addicted to revenge because it keeps you feeling fully alive. Revenge can almost be a drug.
This got me to thinking about the times in life when I was pulled along as a child by the tide of history to not only hate the Germans (the Krauts) and the Japanese (Japs) during the Second World War. I delighted at the thought of destroying the Huns, only to later marry a German girl and then later having good Japanese friends. For years it was the Russians whom I wanted to destroy, and then later Osama Bin Laden and Moslem terrorists without thinking of the humanity of most Moslems.
But most of all, to me, it seems applicable to the polarized divide between MAGAs and Liberals today. MAGA people really feel bitter hatred at the threat of Liberals to their identity, not so much to the neighbor with opposite views to theirs who is obviously fully human, but to some projected image of the other side who are a visceral threat. Liberals are puzzled by this, since they feel themselves to be good people who are right about the state of the world, but Liberals have come to mock MAGA people and to dismiss them as being ignorant and stupid and a threat to everything good and right including a threat to American democracy itself. My experience photographing MAGA people dressed in red, white and blue who often had hateful placards accusing Liberals of every kind of debauchery and evil was that these MAGA people were almost giddy with excitement, having the time of their lives, going from rally to rally because it was such a high. And when I have joined the other side at anti-Trump, anti-MAGA rallies in Asheville, I have found everyone to feel fully righteous and willing to destroy their MAGA oppressors or at least shame and silence them.
So I bought the book and have started reading it. But so far the desire to strike back and defeat, to eliminate, the other side seems to fit his argument that revenge is an addictive high. This high on either side, a product of fear and a desire to strike back, makes it impossible for us to even argue with each other side. Each side blocks out the possibility of either side being able to listen to each other, and certainly the possibility that the other side may be right in certain ways that could even be reconciled with our own side if we would be willing to drop the high of revenge and to accept the other side as human beings whose experience life made them feel the way that they do.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 