This past week produced two moments that were parsed endlessly and yet little understood. One involved former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg telling CBS’ Gayle King that his Democratic rivals could’ve made a lot of money to spend on their campaigns. The other involved House Speaker Nancy Pelosi separating President Donald J. Trump’s personhood from his actions in responding to Sinclair Broadcasting’s James Rosen asking her if she hated the president. Neither Bloomberg’s remark nor Pelosi’s response were satisfactory, revealing a lack of critical thinking.
In Bloomberg’s case, an otherwise intelligent, capable leader and philanthropist sounded as if he had a touch of oblivious affluenza. Not everyone has the opportunity to acquire wealth and, even if he did, not everyone is suited to it. I’ve known plenty of people who started out in finance only to segue to landscaping, teaching, the arts, philanthropy. We are as much a product of what we can’t do as of what we can.
And we are what we actually do as well. From Trump’s birtherism through to his equation of Mexicans with rapists, his denigration of his fellow candidates, his brutal treatment of “crooked” Hillary Clinton, his attempted Muslim ban of legal residents, his “good on both sides” response to Charlottesville, his reference to “s—-hole countries,” his lack of empathy for victims of gun violence, his handling of the border crisis that’s resulted in children in cages, his withdrawal of U.S. troops from our Kurdish allies and, most recently, his anti-Semitic remarks about Jews and money, he has shown himself to be hate-filled.
Pelosi unfortunately swallowed the conservative passive-aggressive bait and gave Rosen a long-winded, defensive Augustinian response that was in essence about Roman Catholics hating the sin and loving the sinner. But that’s disingenuous, isn’t it? Does a woman love her rapist, a child his molester? Did the Allies love the Nazis?
What about when the “sin” is nothing more than an interpretation of morality? Some Catholics have said they oppose homosexuality but love gay people. But isn’t homosexuality key to the identities of gay people?
Who we are is in large part not only what we say but what we do. What Pelosi should’ve done is stated the truth simply and briefly, “Hatred of hate is not hate,” smiled and walked away.