Part of being liberal is believing that all humans, even the ones you don't like, deserve good health and a chance at a happy life. The idea that people should suffer for believing harmful things is where the worst right-wing atrocities come from.

Believe it or not, they think OUR beliefs are harmful and will doom the world and that we should be stopped. They genuinely believe this. So they think it's okay if the "wrong" sort of people suffer. That sort of thinking leads dangerous places.

I can tell that a lot of my liberal friends don't understand this. They think, "If we just show them how much the people in the border camps are suffering, they will DO something!" Nope, they think those people "earned" that suffering. They're fine with it.

The minute you install a switch in your mind that flips to "not human" the moment someone makes you mad enough, you are closer to those right-wing nutjobs* than you are to liberal.

All humans are human. They all experience suffering the same way, and a just society minimizes it in general, without judgment. The minute we start apportioning things like success and comfort according to what we believe people "deserve," we're veering hard to the right.

That is EXACTLY their mindset. They don't care about inequity, because the good people have gotten what they deserve, and the only people suffering are the bad ones. The liberal view is that all humans deserve human rights, and no humans deserve torture or suffering.

Now, that doesn't mean that assholes should get everything they WANT. There is no limit to what DJT and his clan want. Their greed is endless, and they should be denied 99% of the things they want. Denied power. But not a basic, livable life.

Now, if we remove their power and their unfair advantages, they might FEEL tormented, but that's on them. That kind of suffering isn't your concern. That's mindset, and they, like all of us, need to learn a better mindset. I hope they'll have the chance to.

But if you want COVID defeated, wanting them to get it is not liberal. If you want to abolish prison, wanting it for them is not liberal. Anything that your gut tells you is suffering no one should have to endure, wanting someone else to endure it is not liberal.

Vengeance feels good, in a base way. If people cause suffering, they should endure suffering, right? That impulse is where fundamentalist Hell comes from. Do you really want to go there? There are consequences for wrong actions besides torture.

And for the very most privileged and powerful people, loss of power and privilege alone will cause them as much anguish as you could wish for. Hedonic adaptation is a miraculous human phenomenon. If you want schadenfreude, you'll have plenty.

Take away a third of what -anyone- has, and they'll feel like they've been boiled alive. For at least a little while. Actual justice, in the case of the world's worst offenders, would be a harrowing thing for them to experience.

But torturing a torturer does not balance scales. It only adds more torture to the world. And allowing yourself the habit of wishing others misery and finding it "just" changes you. Slowly but surely you become the very person you hate. Decisions to hurt others become easier.

It's a slippery mental slope. If you call yourself a liberal, you are, in theory, hoping to build a world where everyone is comfortable and has a chance to build a decent life. Everyone. Even that asshole over there. Everyone. A liberal should hold onto that.

Because deciding who and who doesn't "deserve" basic freedom from torment is the slipperiest slope of all. You do not have the right to make that call. No human can measure the value of another human. If you think you can, you lean right.

That is the right-wing fallacy at its core. That some people are the Good Sort and some are the Bad Sort, and that those who don't meet a certain standard are excluded from basic human rights. Because they're not REALLY human after all. Most people, in their eyes, aren't.

You might think that it's okay to strip the humanity away from people in power, and wish torment on them, because they're powerful. It's "punching up," it's harmless. But it harms *you.* That kind of thinking gets easier. The boundaries of it shift.

So I'm just saying, if you want to call yourself a liberal, it might be a good idea to notice those thoughts and discourage them, just as you would those gut racist or sexist impulses that sometimes pop up from a lifetime of media brainwashing.

I'm not even talking about forgiveness here. Forgive or don't forgive; that's personal. But beware of the urge for vengeance. There is plenty of literature on that subject.

*I am allowed the hateful term "nutjob" by the Liberal Law of Slur Usage

An astute reader points out that a lot of the right-wing policy and apathy comes from racism. Yes. Race is the flag many of them use to decide who is human and who isn't. And that's what makes right wing dehumanization so particularly horrific. They dehumanize MOST humans.

The Calvinist belief in predestination that is baked into so much American conservatism is that it is known from the beginning whether we will sin, how wicked we are. So the circumstances into which we're born figure in, for the far right.

Someone who was born Black or brown and/or poor is clearly marked by God as wicked, so whatever happens to them, it's deserved. Even the ones who aren't overtly religious have been marinated in this attitude by their peers and families.

It is less reprehensible to flag someone as "no longer human" based on their deeds than by the circumstances of their birth, but it is still not liberal. A liberal believes that there is a limit to what we're allowed to do even to sadists, racists, rapists, sociopaths.

A liberal believes that everyone, to some extent, is a product of both their circumstances and their choices. If people's circumstances nudge them into making horrible choices, all we can do is dish out fair consequences that hopefully shape better choices going forward.

Sometimes the consequences to actions should be severe. I'm honestly still making up my mind whether prison is ever okay, and under what circumstances. That's a subject I'm still educating myself on. But I digress.

Mostly I just wanted to make sure I addressed racism specifically, because I don't want to make it sound like I'm doing some false-equivalence thing like, "Wishing DJT dies of COVID is the same as being racist!" It is not. Being racist is the endpoint of this slippery slope.

Being racist is what happens when your view of who is Actually Human becomes so narrow that it contracts to "the tiny minority of the world's population that most closely resembles me." You can wish harm on a select few and not be a monster. You're just not liberal.

And that's all I'm saying. If you don't call yourself liberal, it's fine to lovingly imagine bad people being tortured, I suppose. It's not how I roll, but we can still be friends. I'll be watching, however, to see how much farther right you veer once you get more power.