Salon magazine published a sadly insightful article on the psychology of hate, a paragraph pasted below and the link below that. It applies, unfortunately, to way too many issues affecting our every day lives. There’s so much writing begging for your time — this piece should be at the top of your list. Our tolerance and the humanity we will turn over to our children make this important reading. 

“Like closing your eyes and then concluding that nothing exists, failing to engage your ability to reason about the mind of another person not only leads to indifference about others, it can also lead to the sense that others are relatively mindless. Most extreme examples typically involve some kind of hatred or prejudice that distances people from one another. The Nazis, building on centuries of anti-Semitic stereotypes, depicted the Jews as greedy rats without conscience or as gluttonous pigs lacking self-control. The Hutus in Rwanda depicted the Tutsis as mindless cockroaches before killing them by the hundreds of thousands.”

http://www.salon.com/2014/03/02/the_psychology_of_hate_how_we_deny_human_beings their_humanity/