Everyone has had to deal with difficult people. As I am writing this there are apparently 7.7 billion people in the world, which means there are 7.7 billion unique personalities, each with their own ideas, experiences, beliefs, and prejudices. For most people, what is any belief, political, religious, or otherwise, but a disguised prejudice. At any rate, with 7.7 billion personalities, disagreement is inevitable, and we are bound to encounter someone we find distasteful, to put it mildly. Conversely, each one of us will be a difficult person to someone else.
I have encountered people in my life who seemed to be so devoid of any redeemable qualities, who had negative characteristics to such a degree that I found it hard to believe that they brought value to anyone else’s life. I couldn’t help but assume that they were as unloved as they were unloving. Which is tragic in many ways. It’s a thought that should never cross one’s mind: that a person, a unique personality, bearing the image of God, does not bring any value into the world. While I know that casting such a judgment is immoral, it is regrettably a very easy one to make, particularly in anger. In all likelihood making such judgments confirms that I am a difficult person myself. By entertaining such thoughts, I have degraded myself, and lost any possible claim to the moral high-ground. Still, I will always maintain that one does not become as difficult as these unnamed people, except by choice.
When a person, whose value is so difficult to find, does things that are demonstrably wrong, it becomes even easier to cast judgment, however immoral it might be. Furthermore, if you’re standing on the outside watching a difficult person do harm to others, to the point where it seems that the only thing they bring to to the world is suffering in varying degrees, it becomes easier still to make such a pronouncement. An outsider can expressly, or unconsciously, fall back on the argument that since a particular difficult person doesn’t directly affect them, they are only an impartial observer, therefore unbiased, therefore fair. A choice that one might ordinarily consider unthinkable might become defensible to the mind willing to rationalize.
