I’d Like To Feel Compassion For You But You Suck
By: Nicole Chardenet
Tags: Buddhism, Mental Health, Self Improvement, Humor, Compassion

It’s hard to be compassionate with people we dislike, even people for whom there are good reasons to dislike. When others are hurting others, it’s difficult to try and see the world through their eyes. Why do Trumpies have to be so hateful? I ask myself. Why can’t they just leave others alone? If their lives are so awful, why don’t they stop voting for their oppressors?

You are dancing the fandango on my last good nerve. Photo by Dan Deluca on Flickr

“Remember your plan!” the book called to me in that annoying sing-song voice we associate with sticky-sweet kindergarten teachers.

“Screw sucky people!” I yelled back, and stuffed The Plan on my bookshelf between Angry White Men and When She Was Bad: Violent Women and the Myth of Innocence.

But…

Common wisdom holds that we hate most in others what we hate in ourselves.

We sure as hell don’t like to consider people who suck and find ugly commonalities.

Are Trumpie critics like myself as different from the largely white entitled faces beneath foreign-manufactured MAGA hats as we’d like to think?

No, you might say. I’m not like them at all! I don’t hate blacks or Muslims and I sure as hell don’t think we need that stupid wall! I would never treat women the way Donald Trump has!

Ditto, all of that.

Except…maybe differences run only surface-deep.

If there’s one thing all of humanity has in common, it’s a strong preponderance for Wrong Perceptions, as Buddhists call it. We filter the world through our own unique lens, clouded by our prejudices, fears, insecurities, values, aspirations, and narratives. Not only are they often inaccurate, they can be downright dangerous.

One reason why Donald Trump’s supporters attack the people ‘below’ them, economically at least (blacks and Mexicans) is because it’s easier than attacking those truly responsible — specifically people like Donald Trump — their economic ‘betters’ — who ‘keep them in their place’.

Acknowledging otherwise means admitting to themselves an insight even more intolerable: Trumpies have been voting for their own economic oppression.

This means they’ve been duped. Psyched. Hoodwinked. They let it happen. They agreed to it.

How different are the rest of us, really? How many of us deny our own role for where we are in life? How many of us vote for our own oppression, figuratively if not on Election Day?

When I started paying attention to my own Trumpie ‘triggers’, I began to realize I was less angry with them than I was with myself.

On some fundamental level, their chronic, blind stupidity reminds me of my own.

When I stopped myself in the middle of a news-triggered mental rant to investigate my thought processes, I found patterns that clearly resembled a Trumpie’s. I was angry about being out of work and ignored by hiring managers and recruiters, not even worth the consideration of a stupid auto-gen email. And articles about the way companies squeezed more work out of new hires for lower and lower wages in a race to the economic bottom (for us, not them), often accompanied by similarly aggrieved reader comments about how badly others were treated, with or without jobs.

If I didn’t find some other way to make money, one day I might be an angry Trumpie in a trailer park. And…while my anger at the unfeeling corporate world wouldn’t be entirely misplaced, I had to confront some ugly truths about how I’d let myself get pigeon-holed into one particular job and skill set and explore why I’d let myself stagnate.

The answer… “I haven’t been engaged in my work for years,” had everything to do with me.

I was, as it turned out, exactly like the Trumpies just underneath, and every other aggrieved class of people. We much prefer to blame others than to assign blame to the ones who truly deserve it, including and especially accepting our fair share of it.

Don’t make me pull my bitch switch. Photo by PourquoiPas on Needpix

So…maybe those angry hateful Trumpies do deserve my compassion.

Deeper down, into the unconscious, no one knows what’s driving them at the roots unless they jackhammer down to where the really scary shit is. The parts the ego keeps carefully walled off because it’s just — too terrible to anticipate what might actually lie in wait. Your worst fears. Your biggest insecurities. The least attractive You the ego would rather just forget about because denial is a terrific Egyptian vacation spot.

That’s where the healing is, though. Those hero myths always feature some heroic dude journeying through his own psyche but women have to do it too.

Buddhism teaches that we all have a core, inherent ‘Buddha nature’…the very best parts of ourselves, the parts that, like the ugly stuff in the unconscious, are so deeply buried we don’t even know it’s all there. We deny its very existence! We can believe the worst about ourselves with no effort, but we can’t acknowledge the beautiful spirit that also resides within, embracing the Shadow with compassion.

When I get angry about a Trump rally, I try to imagine what his supporters must be like at home, or with their friends or family or church. They’re probably not haters 100% of the time.

They’re not perfect people, and sometimes they’re downright awful.

But so are we all, even if we don’t express it the same way.

Sometimes I try to feel compassion for Trump himself. It’s not as hard as you might think. I want to read a good biography, because I suspect he wasn’t born a narcissistic psychopath. Supposedly, from what little I’ve read and heard from not always reliable sources, he was raised that way by his father.

Sometimes I wonder what kind of man Donald Trump might have been if he was born into a different family. His privilege has been his greatest handicap, mentally and emotionally crippling him his entire life.

One might wonder the same of his buddies Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, and Rodrigo Duterte.

Or ourselves. The ‘birth lottery’ is the most unfair ‘privilege’ system of all. The real winners are the ones born into loving, supporting, non-abusive households and environments. Who truly ‘deserves’ the environment they were born into? How might you have turned out if you’d been born a Trump?

Maybe we’ve got more in common with him than we know.