“Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.”

- Eleanor Roosevelt.

Two hours, I spent with you. Just two, short hours.

And yet, after just two hours in your company, I felt nauseous. Poisoned.

It made me so terribly sad.

You have so much hate. So much anger. So much groundless rage.

You reduced other people to dirt. You reduced them to nothingness.

All of their likes, loves, dislikes, passions, weaknesses, strengths,

became irrelevant; they became a one-dimensional object to be loathed, vilified, and ostracized.

At other times, you praised others. At first, it was a welcome change.

But your praise graduated to adulation, then to an almost servile exaltation. With your compliments, you lifted people onto pedestals, glazed over their faults, and made them out to be like porcelain. Perfect, and flawless. But this illustrious image you painted was so incredibly fake, and like porcelain, extremely breakable.

Soon, even your praise and even your love lost its meaning; I soon saw that your affection, too, was groundless. Blinded? Perhaps. You’ve mistaken the unquestioning support of your “allies” as an expression of good will.

Your hate. Your love. Now, they both mean nothing. Your words are like vermin: prolific, but dirty. Filthy. A thing to be hidden.

Yes, yes, we knew it then: your opinions had no foundation in truth. I have said it before: groundless. Your very own words testified to your instability; you were an erratic whirlwind of subjectivity, hot with brutal stubbornness, untempered by the warmth of wisdom.

Your view of humanity, it seemed, had been built heavily on a fragile framework of first impressions, of scandalous gossip. A huge tower of one-sided stories built on nothing but frothy puffs of stratus and cumulus, crafted and maintained by your unslakable lust for something new to report.

If the words that one says serve as accurate reflections of the cogitations of their mind, then I can say this with certainty: people are at the center of your mind now. And worse yet, your lifestyle and your chosen company has made it acceptable.

But the bulk of your speech is still nothing but a pocketful of loose-lipped judgments. Gossip.

And because gossip grows old, wearisome, and stale, you will create more. Your tower will grow in complexity. But bitterness and haste makes for a terrible architect;

And your tower, teetering sadly in the wind, will collapse one day. Your judgmental tendencies will one day thrust you in a catch-22; you will have no easy escape.

But this is not what I want for you. I want to you to have the ability to care for those who wrong you, to forgive. To do away with typecasts and labels, and to see things as they are. 

I will not give up on you. I pray that this view of you that I now hold is, too, groundless. I hope that I am wrong. As for now,

Go! Go and love more, my friend.

  1. afr0 posted this