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In reply to the discussion: Ed Norton 🧵: I'm no political pundit but I grew up w a dad who was a federal prosecutor & he taught [View all]PatSeg
(47,412 posts)I never wanted to paint certain people with a broad brush, knowing that life is more complex than that and people are more complicated. I often used psychology, philosophy, and metaphysics to explain divergent behavior of other people, though not always successfully.
I've never considered myself naïve, but now I have to wonder if at my age I'm coming to a new and unsettling awareness of the world around me. Years ago, I read a book about relatively normal, intelligent people in Germany in the 1930s and the horror they experienced watching their friends and neighbors transform into unrecognizable monsters. That is how I've felt the past few years. We no longer have to question how on earth that could have happened, as we are witnessing it in real time. It isn't because we as Americans are inherently better people, we just had better institutions and laws to keep such insanity in check for the most part.