Thoughts to Build On

especially emotional, well-being. They expect (and in-
wardly demand) undying gratitude for favors, attentions
or services, even the most insignificant, which they may
have rendered others in the past. They feel that these
"debts" which others "owe" them must be paid, again and
again, in sympathy, attention and services, and their re-
sentment spreads to include these "debtors" if such "debts"
are not repeatedly paid and repaid.
Thus begins one phase of resentment: self-pity,
which is the cause of much chronic emotional agony and
much mental absorption in negative thinking.
But seH-pity is just one of the results of resent-
ment. There is another in which resentment begins with
burning anger and escalates through an upward spiral to
hatred, vengeance, and sometimes murder or insanity. Usu-
ally resentment escalates to intense feelings of hatred,
often to a conscious or subconscious desire for vengeance,
sometimes fulfilled by action.
Much too often does the resentment-hatred-
vengeance spiral culminate in murder. While vengeance is
not the only motive for murder (although it often is a
principal ingredient), and while firearms are not the only
means of murder, it is a shocking statistic that since 1900
more than 750,000 Americans have been shot to death in
their homes, which far exceeds all of the Americans
killed in battle in all the wars in which the United States
has fought.
Even though murder and insanity are unlikely
climaxes for the feelings of resentment which most of us
experience all too frequently, resentment causes so much