This is an empathy exercise, but don’t worry: you’re gonna get to hate someone along the way if you want to. Or if you love them, that’s okay too. The exercise doesn’t hinge on your hatred of them.
Okay, so bring to mind someone you really had a problem with in the past. A school bully or something. Let’s add some twists to that: now they have a lawn sign of your most opposite political party. And they step on kitten tails too. In short, a real jerk. I’m gonna call them “Jones” in the following story.
One morning a li’l earlier than you’d like, it’s before breakfast, before anything, there’s a ring on your door. You open groggily.
Outside are a bunch of police and they put you in the car. Not gently.
It takes a while until they let you know on what charges you’re arrested. Convicted, even. Actually it’s not even until you’re on the firing row that they’ll let you know your supposed crime:
Apparently, Jones (or the political leadership he voted in) killed someone overseas. And that country has an “for each one of us who dies, one of them needs to die” policy. And you won that lottery. Congratulations.
Now that story makes zero sense. It’s an absurd, bad, and awful story. Because the “for each of us who dies one of you needs to die” approach does not make sense.
And the war between Trump and Khameini makes no sense. Here we have leaders who only a small minority of the population in “their” respective country actually approve of, and they’re perpetually “retaliating” by killing “one of them”. Or “ten of them”.