The older I get the more puzzled I get. It's a common sentiment, expressed in various combinations of words. I find myself now in a state where not only am I puzzled by a few major things (I think I have been since I was a little fella) but I am puzzled by virtually everything I see and hear in the news about the behavior of my soon to be 9 billion fellow human beings.
Here is a common theme on HuffPo. Some news item will appear about Castro or Chavez, Cuba or Venezuela, and hatred will pour out on to my screen, hatred so virulent that you can only picture keyboard keys being melted in the face of incandescent rage being directed through fingers. Or there will be an article about the Short March of global warming, and the outraged responses will appear linking those concerned about our rapidly changing climate to those accompanying Mao on the Long March. Rarely far into a thread before those of us calling for urgent action on greenhouse gases will be accused of fomenting world communism.
The question is - why this hatred? I understand nationalism (I even understand, though I don't do it myself, screaming abuse at an opposing football team) and jingoism, though I prefer patriotism. I understand that people prefer their own country, and have doubts ranging from minor to severe about whether they could live in another country that eats this kind of food, plays that kind of sport, speaks this odd language, wears these odd clothes, has a certain kind of electoral system, has odd religious habits, treats women in various appalling ways, has the death penalty. We all feel most comfortable in, love best, the country we were born in, or chose to move to.
But why, among all of those cultural and social differences between the 190 plus countries of the world, is it the ones who, among all their other features, have a socialist/communist government that are singled out for this hatred? If you think of every aspect of society as a rainbow across the world, with every shade of language, and music, and sport, and clothes, and religion, and agriculture, and transport, and law, and government, why, out of all that huge variety, would you direct your hatred only at the socialism part of the political bit of other countries?
Labor governments are not hated, or social democrat, or liberal democrat, or christian democrat; nor it seems, at the other end of the political rainbow are nationalist, or conservative, or fascist. Doesn't matter whether the electoral system is some shade of democracy, or pure dictatorship, as long as the guiding philosophy is not a socialist one.
So the question to answer my puzzle, I guess, is - what are you afraid of? Is Hugo Chavez planning world domination, coming to take your money from under your bed? Is Castro going to invade America? Why then do you care whether they are, respectively, running Venezuela and Cuba? I know why the giant corporations care - these are countries where they may not get their own way, less chance there of adding to the giant profits of, say, Exxon (a bit like pre-war Iraq, really). So I get it that the mainstream media would be hammering away, 'Hate Week' after 'Hate Week', trying to convince you that socialist governments are the enemy.
What puzzles me, though, is why you are buying it.