The Day I Realized I Was Still Sowing Seeds of Animosity

Here’s Looking at You, Donald What’s-His-Name

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Note: I welcome and enjoy comments and conversation; however, this essay is meant to focus on personal growth, not politics; please don’t respond with non-constructive criticisms or grievances. Deeper insights are welcomed.

I’ve been journaling since high school. About ten years ago I left off penning my thoughts into an ever-growing collection of college composition books and moved my journaling to my laptop. One perk of the digital option is the ability to search my years of recorded thoughts by keyword. This morning, on a whim, I searched for “Donald Trump.” Turns out, even someone as uninspiring as this lost soul has inspired me to emotional and spiritual growth. I should thank him, but I’ll just say: May he find peace someday.

1/21/2020
—Today is the first day of the impeachment trial against Donald Trump. Good. May justice, morality, and good sense prevail.

6/21/2020
—This morning—Father’s Day—I walked at Kalmus Beach. I’d been listening to an interview on NPR while driving there, and the interviewee had commented that hate does not come naturally; it has to be taught. I was thinking about that comment on my walk, and a little later, sitting on the jetty at the far end of the beach, a powerful insight came to me.

Progressive thinkers may be aware that we have to be taught to hate. But are they aware—as I have not been until this very moment—that they are still teaching hatred? The last remnant, or holdout, of conditioned hatred—one that even the most enlightened of us are not aware of—is the sanctioned act of hating the haters. In our quest to make the world a better place we believe it’s okay to hate those who spread hatred and violence—the racists, the white supremacists, the dictators and autocrats, the bullies and rapists, anyone who commits crimes against society or humanity. We are taught that hating them is not only okay, but a moral imperative. Our parents, our teachers, our mentors, our leaders and activists; so many of them hate the hater, complaining, criticizing, demonizing, condemning—mocking and ridiculing Donald Trump, for example, or an ex-spouse, or a racist cop, or a school shooter. These wrongdoers are publicly condemned by our finest leaders, who show no attempt to understand the behavior, to see the perpetrator as a victim of upbringing, poverty, mental illness, or other circumstances. They show no compassion or empathy or willingness to look deeper into the miscreant’s humanity.

Something about realizing this helped me to feel better about this intolerance in myself. I have been so caught up in despising Trump. Part of me knew I was only subjecting myself to negativity by even paying attention at all, and I have tried to limit my exposure, but I guess that’s the thing; I thought of my attention as just that—a willingness to be exposed to the negativity—but not as hatred. I must have thought, like so many  liberal and progressive thinkers, that I stood on moral ground, since Trump is a danger to society and is so hateful himself.

I was wrong.

This brought a tear to my eye—the profound realization that I have been hating. That I have cultivated the seeds of hatred and made no attempt to see the humanity in this man. Sure, I’ve made a couple of intellectual attempts, but I never really felt it in my heart until today. Today I realized that despising and condemning those who are hurting others is not helping the world at all.

As I sat on a rock on the Kalmus Point jetty I thought to myself, I want to be like you, Thich Nhat Hanh.  (I had been reading a lot of Thich Nhat Hanh; a Buddhist monk, writer, and teacher who refuses to condemn any human being, regardless of their wrongful acts.)

1/10/2021
—I am not going to comment on the violent insurrection on the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, January 6, during the official certification of Biden’s 2020 presidential win, except to say that it turned me into a news junkie, unable to stop tuning in to hear the latest development, mostly in the hopes of hearing that Trump has been removed from office. Nothing yet.

(I never watch Trump rallies, but Wednesday I watched the “Save America March” speech or whatever they called it because I had a feeling something bad was going to happen. But after a half hour I was bored with Trump’s lies about a stolen and fraudulent election and I shut it off. An hour later his mob of supporters, urged to go the Capital and fight to “stop the steal,” breached the Capitol. Jennifer saw it on social media and called me to the living room from the bedroom where I was reading a book. We turned the TV back on.)

10/19/2023
—Today I zoomed in on an internet pic of Donald Trump and just looked at it for 10 minutes. I looked until I no longer saw a bad man, a narcissist, an aggressive sadist, an evil dictator. I looked until all I saw was a face, a human face—skin, eyes, nose, mouth—just like any other face. I saw a body that belongs as completely to nature as I do.

Later I was scrolling on Facebook and I saw that N (an acquaintance) had posted yet another glamour shot of himself. I scrolled away quickly like I always do, because all I see when I come across pictures that this man posts of himself is vanity, arrogance, conceit—and I hate the feeling it leaves me with. Then I remembered my earlier experiment, and I scrolled back up to the image, zoomed in and did the same kind of looking. I looked until the perceptions and opinions and memories and feelings that I cling to so tightly that I actually see them embodied in N's face—all those images fell away, and, like with Trump, I only saw a man’s face. I saw nature. I saw a person who is empty, like me, of a separate self.

A good lesson: face your fears, face your feelings, face your beliefs and biases. Get intimate with them, say hello to them, scrutinize them until they fade and begin to disappear.

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It’s funny how so many of us are unwilling to say Donald Trump’s name. The protagonist in the novel I’m reading, Martyr!, by Kaveh Akbar, refers to him as “President Invective.” Others have called him simply “45” or “He-who-shall-not-be-named.” The singer/songwriter John Gorka, in his 1991 song, “Where the Bottles Break,” alludes to “Donald What’s-his-name,” which is where I got the sub-title for this essay.

It points, I think, to our fear of empowering something by naming it. But most often the opposite is true; our fears only grow stronger when we push them down and out of sight. It is by understanding our feelings at their core that we can be done with them and put them aside for good.

Orkideh, a working artist in the novel I mentioned, Martyr!, is dying of cancer. Her final piece, entitled Death-Speak, consists of a table, two folding chairs, and herself, and is installed at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, where, each day, visitors line up to talk with Orkideh about death, or about anything they’d like to know of a dying woman. Now that’s what I call facing your fears! (This novel is a debut for its author, and is quite unusual; I’ll let you know how it turns out!)

I hope when my own death is near I’ll have the courage, or wisdom, to speak death’s name, to look death in the face until my projections and delusions fall away and I can see clearly its living nature, which is my own nature.

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Books Mentioned

—Akbar, Kaveh. Martyr! 2024, Knopf
—Here is a list of books by Thich Nhat Hanh

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