In 1938, while recovering in Kent from a likely Tubercular fit, not long after his time fighting in the Spanish civil war, George Orwell wrote a letter to the playwright Stephen Spender explaining why he had previously attacked him in print. The letter--written 85 years ago--speaks volumes about our contemporary internet moment in connection with political polarization.
Below is the crucial part of the letter and the link. Enjoy.
“You ask how it is that I attacked you not having met you, & on the other hand changed my mind after meeting you. I don’t know that I had ever exactly attacked you, but I had certainly in passing made offensive remarks about ‘parlour Bolsheviks such as Auden & Spender’ or words to that effect. I was willing to use you as a symbol of the parlour Bolshie because a. your verse, what I had read of it, did not mean very much to me, b. I looked upon you as a sort of fashionable successful person, also a Communist or Communist sympathizer, & I have been very hostile to the C.P. since about 1935, & c. because not having met you I could regard you as a type & also an abstraction. Even if when I met you I had not happened to like you, I should still have been bound to change my attitude, because when you meet anyone in the flesh you realize immediately that he is a human being and not a sort of caricature embodying certain ideas.”
https://theamericanreader.com/15-april-1938-george-orwell-to-stephen-spender/
So true! Even on jobs, in life, when you meet people you don’t generally agree with or dislike, you soften up for the most part, since you realize they are human. And empathize at a very organic level.
killin me here....finally pulled up to job site and its,Already noon
aieeeeee
turnin off phone ha