a hazy shade of winter

There is no Golden Rule gene like there is blue eye gene, it's some kind of general collection, and some of us have more of them and some have less.  It's an advantage if you are a social animal, not so much if you are a nonsocial animal.  You can teach a dog a trick and he will do it just to please you, but if you want your cat to jump through a hoop, you better have a treat on the other side.

As far as terrorists go they think they are doing the right thing, well Hitler thought he was doing the right thing.  When they interpret the golden rule it comes out as do unto others (of my group) as they do unto you, and people who aren't a member of their group don't count as people so what happens to them is no consequence.  As for common criminals I think they are nice enough to their families and likely their neighbors and members of the same gang.

I have known people who would be insulted if you said they were good and complimented if you said they were bad.  Most of them weren't all that bad, but they affected some of the cultural norms and terminology of the real bad guys.  Why would anybody want to do that?

I wonder if these bad  people Beagles is referring to are the students at Gage Park high.  There was a sort of hood element there where you wanted to act like you were a tough guy,  Actually I wanted to look like a tough guy.  I greased my hair back and walked with what I thought was a tough guy saunter,  I liked to stick my cig in the corner of my mouth and leave it there.  I felt like I should be out stealing hubcaps, like Mad Magazine said teenage hoods did, but I was too weenie for that.  See even now I am describing law abiding folks as weenies.  What is the matter with me?

I don't know.  I was just trying to be cool.  I guess that is as deep an answer as I am going to come up with.  I am wondering what the cultural terminology was.  Tough guy slang?

Back to the golden rule, if our genes tell us to follow it, how come some of us aren't very nice?  There is that thing where we draw a small altruistic circle around ourselves so that almost everybody else is outside of it.  And there is rationalization where we have the ability to make everything we do into the right thing/

So there are, ahem, exceptions that prove the rule.

I'm sorry dawgs, I think I am still in a post op fog and can't marshall  my thoughts properly on this hazy winter morning.  Monday i hope to be right there with the crew.