Some years ago, the corporate vampires and slugs who took over commercial and cable broadcasting discovered that fear and hatred and anger are much more profitable thank compassion and truth and honesty.

The political consultants figured out the same thing – exploiting fear and promoting age is a powerful political tool, and works more often than not. The mix of hatred-spouting cultures, screens and politics, has turned out to be toxic beyond anyone’s imagination.

Love and empathy just don’t draw people in the same way, perhaps because they are not about fear and perceived danger. The love and compassion peddlers don’t get rich, they are pushed to the margins of society, they don’t get to sit on those TV panels.

This ethos has infected our legislative and political system, the Internet, and the culture of social media,  even personal relationships and friendships. Digital communications are so often a corrosive hatefest.  The idea of hating the other is now a mainstream idea.

On this blog early on, I swore to a willingness to disagree with and listen to people whose opinions differ from my own. I disagree with people all the time, and quite openly, and many people hate me for me.

But I do not ever hate people for seeing the world differently than I do, I learn much from them. We all believe we are speaking from a place of righteousness, we are all doing the best we can.

To me, the very of refusing to read the thoughts of somebody because they disagree is a betrayal of the very idea of democracy, which is still, for me, the best form of government that I know of. I am seeing that many people disagree even with that.

When the 2016 election was over, there were about a dozen quite open supporters of President Trump in the creative group I ran and posting on my blog.

I am very proud of the fact that 10 of those people are still on the group, still posting, still reading my blog.  I sometimes make them uneasy, but I have never insulted them or driven them away.

They know, of course, where my political instincts tend to drift, but I also know that the new politics has put a light on many people left behind and abandoned by our political system for decades – they live all around me – and our world is not as black and white as the news would have it.

The problem I have is not with people who disagree with me, but rather people who can’t accept  who I am, or how I write, or my willingness to challenge people who violate my boundaries, erode my dignity or undermine my search for identity.

I stand with New York Times Columnist David Brooks, who wrote recently that what we need is not to disagree less but to disagree better.

“And that starts when you turn away the rhetorical dope peddlers – the powerful people on your own side,” he wrote, “who are profiting from the culture of contempt. Remember, when you find yourself hating something, someone is making money or winning elections or getting more famous and powerful…you are being used.” Fox News And MSNBC will earn billions of dollars this year, mostly by spreading fear and contempt.

There are plenty of suckers in the world.

This work to reject intolerance continues with the idea that you don’t run from people you disagree with, or who disagree with you. Those are the ones you need to talk to.

A week ago I wrote about my confusion about being a grandfather and my reluctance to step into the role seeing my granddaughter as a transformation of my life.  I like my life. It’s a complicated issue for me.

For others, it is very simple.

A woman was quick to scold me online for being ungrateful and whining. Her family (and grandchild) suffered from awful health problems, which she detailed, and she said I should be grateful for what I had. Her tone was contemptuous, I’m sure she has known real pain and suffering.

I wrote back that this was inappropriate and disturbing to me, I was sorry for her troubles, but they would not and should not shape my own relationship with my daughter or grandchild.

It was not appropriate, I said, for her to inject her grandchild’s troubles into my life, they had no bearing on my granddaughter. She was passing her pain onto me, and I was declining to accept it. That is what a boundary is.

When she left, I lost the chance to hear from a loving grandmother struggling to cope with so much pain and trouble, and she lost a chance to learn how take those problems where they belonged, which was not in a Facebook post to a stranger.

There is nothing to be  gained by hating each other.

But she was offended, and stormed off in a huff, as often happens with people who are used to giving opinions freely, but are not able to bear them. Quite often, I am accused of being a digital bully, of being cruel and ferocious, a “thug” as one person suggested, to people who are just trying to help me.

I hope these people never meet a real bully or a thug.

She was not interested I what I had to say. I never told this woman to go away or tried to drive her off of my blog.  She was quite welcome to stay, even though she didn’t like what I said, and I didn’t like what she said

But because I dared to disagree with her and challenge her,  she was outraged and had to run away, or storm away. She could not possibly stay and read my writing any longer.

There it is, really.

I disagree with people all the time, and they disagree with me all the time, every day, in many different forms, in paper and online, on Facebook and Twitter texts. Disagreement is healthy, it is democratic, it is human. I can’t imagine reading anyone’s blog every day if I never disagreed with it. What’s the point of that? I can enable myself.

I see many writers, especially online, who live only for the sappy and dependable feedback of social media. Praise is cheaply offered and easily gained. Dialogue is something else.

Hatred for the other is a sickness now, it has spread virally all over the country, it starts in one place and then moves on to other places.  There is no better and quicker vehicle for spreading hatred than TV screens and the Internet.

If you hate and fear a refugee, you will soon enough figure out how to hate  a Jew, or an African-American, or a Mexican. People have always needed people to hate, it makes their small lives bigger, and our world smaller.

I celebrate a world with disagreement. I just want to make sure I disagree better.