This country has felt more stunned and doomed than at any time since the assassinations of the 1960s and the Vietnam War, and while a sense of foreboding may be appropriate, the hate is not. At some point, the hate becomes an elective. I was becoming insane, letting politicians get me whipped up into visions of revenge, perp walks, and jail. But it didn't work as a drug, neither calming nor animating me. There is no beauty or safety in hatred. As a long-term strategy, based on craziness, it's doomed.
No one can take this hatred off me. I have to surrender it every time I become aware of it. This will not go well, I know. But I don't want my life's ending to be that I was toxic and self-righteous, and I don't know if my last day here will be next Thursday or in twenty years. Whenever that day comes, I want to be living, insofar as possible, in the Wendell Berry words "Be joyful though you have considered all the facts," . . .
-Anne Lamott, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope
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