I have often dismissed smart people who thought we were heading for WW3.
Not because I didn't think it was possible, but because I couldn't wrap my mind around it.
But...
Nuclear powers are involved in conflicts that keep getting bigger.
Dehumanization is rampant.
State agents of various US entities are not only targeting political dissidents, which has been happening for decades, but also are heedlessly harming bystanders with zero accountability. (To be clear, I condemn state violence against activists, but seeing the audacity with which they hurt bystanders without even a veneer of legitimacy has shocked me)
I believe absolutely that humans are kind, community-oriented, and want to help each other live better lives. I also see that we live in a system whereby power and security can be gained by a few by turning people against each other, and that desire to protect our communities can be manipulated into an us vs them mentality.
There was a conversation on KPFK that I caught a few moments of about shame, and its usefulness or harmfulness. And the thing I didn't hear in the part of the conversation I heard, but that I think is essential to understanding, is that shame is only useful when a person believes they belong to the community that is shaming them.
We think Trump is shameless, but he doesn't belong to our community. I don't know who he feels community with, but I'll bet there are social mores that he could be shamed about if it was his community shaming him.
Similarly, a Nazi can't make me feel shame about not being polite to them.
But I consider myself a member of my work community, and so if the classroom is messy at the end of the day, I stay longer and clean for fear of the shame or if I don't have time to clean, I apologize and feel bad, and that feeling reinforces my efforts to do better in the future.
Shame can be incredibly harmful, but we have it as a species because it's useful. But we have to agree that something matters to the community for it to be useful.
This post is all over the place.
Please, let's share the value that every human life deserves respect. So a war is innately a terrible thing and we should feel great shame as a community of earthlings if we have war.