Jaundiced Eyes

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/04/opinion/politics-friends-trump-pandemic.html

("We Were Friends for Years. Trump Tore Us Apart")

I look at people differently now. 

For most of my existence (and it now stretches into its eighth decade) I believed that the overwhelming majority of human beings were fundamentally good. At least they were pointed in the right direction, even if they were sometimes rough around the edges.

But with the insinuation of Mr. Trump into our lives and our brains I no longer harbor such positive assumptions for much of the rest of humanity. 

He has poisoned the well, made me question our basic nature. If there is one thing, maybe beyond all others, that makes me so very pissed off at Mr. Trump it is that he has stolen my rose colored glasses.

I now look at far too many with jaundiced eyes, no longer seeing them in their best light, but tinted now by my concern as to the hardness of their heart and the shallowness of their thought.

They may well not deserve such reprobation. I am both angered and saddened that my capacity to believe in a universe peopled by those of innate goodness has been ripped away. 

As I have been indelibly altered, so too I am certain that many others have a vastly different vision of who I am. Their questioning, their challenging of my essential being, their perception that I am overwhelmed by a myopic gullibility, has been raised and their opinion of me lowered, due to the incessant prattling of Mr. Trump

Such is the terrible signature of a man who has done nothing but make this the divided and diminished state of America. Donald Trump’s most horrid and lasting legacy is that he taught us to hate. Strike that. He gave us permission to hate.