Thank you very much. Sometimes I think: “I can’t believe I did that”. It puts pressure on me not to let down my 13yo former self (and I haven’t!)

The postscript is that my dad was very, very proud of me. (Dad was a “Changer”: Lifelong Democrat until Jimmy Carter.)

Never forget: “The monsters are the monsters.”

You’re in the therapy biz. Do you have ideas about what it will mean for you?

Precisely. That’s what happened in my class; the teacher and students were appologists for the real monsters while excoriating the actions of the victims.

I’d like to time travel back and kick Rod Serling right in his pinko ass for causing me so much trouble in my 8th grade life.

The monsters are the monsters.

My problem is not so much, as you put it, “Peace-loving liberals make excuses for violent people around the world, trying to convince us that thuggish dictators, Islamists, and criminals would all be just fine if we hadn’t exploited/ insulted/ oppressed them so much”.

There’s also the other side of the coin: people unwilling to excuse their own side for anything, such as mentioning certain derogatory words, failing to support trendy causes e.g. global warming, and so forth.

When the latter get demonized instead of the former, there’s something seriously wrong. (And one is tempted to ask the question: isn’t it possible that it’s the other way around? That disbelievers in global warming are simply misguided and under-educated, whereas the people who blow up schoolbuses and saw people’s heads off are evil and must be fought? Now that’s a liberal mindset I’d like to see more of.)

respectfully,
Daniel in Brookline

The teacher may have been technically correct in that the author’s intent was to show that we are the monsters, but somehow I don’t think that particular lesson would have been chosen if the teacher didn’t agree with the scriptwriter on this.

IIRC, the power goes out for no reason and later, machines turn off and on for no reason. The monsters create a nightmare, senseless environment and ordinary people react very badly to that. Quelle surprise, eh? One wonders how the scriptwriters would react if their lawnmowers turned themselves on for no reason.

The extension of that reasoning is the Sophie’s Choice scenario, where the monsters attempt to make the ordinary person morally responsible for the monsters’ evil.

Let’s bring this up to present day, as I think it is revealing. Peace-loving liberals make excuses for violent people around the world, trying to convince us that thuggish dictators, Islamists, and criminals would all be just fine if we hadn’t exploited/insulted/oppressed them so much. They thereby encourage the violence by giving it legitimacy. (They do this for self-serving political reasons, though they disguise that even to themselves – but that’s another story).

Their hands are clean. They committed no violence. They got proxies to do it for them.

The monsters are the monsters.

I appreciate neoneo’s reflections on the topic. The commenters’ stories are also interesting.

I wish we could have a meet-up and trade stories.

In my own awakening, humor played a large role. I’d accidentally land on right wing websites and — against my will — their over-the-top ridicule of the Left would make me laugh. Think Ace Of Spades or TJICistan.

It was a forbidden pleasure. After all, these were stupid people, and I fancied myself an enlightened intellectual. But they were having so much fun! It wasn’t grim. They didn’t have to consult the PC handbook before they spoke.

thanks again to everyone here.