Loving People

I have a problem. Well, more of a dilemma I suppose. Basically I fight against myself in my view of my fellow man. A typical statement that someone close to me might hear at least once a week from my mouth is "people are stupid." This might be spoken at various levels of agitation or emotion ranging from simply matter-of-fact to greatly angered at some event that has transpired either to me or something I read or heard about. This viewpoint can creep into my basic outlook on humanity. Unfortunately it is all too often reinforced by what I read in the news, my basic perceptions of American culture (read here especially TV), and my personal interactions (don't worry, most of the time not with my friends). I'm almost finished with "Whose Land? Whose Promise" which tackles the Christian view to Israel and Palestine. It's been a great read and I'd highly recommend it. But I find myself getting angered at the Israelis (not all of them of course) and the Christian evangelicals who seemingly mindlessly and unquestionably support the state of Israel in all that they do. What are these people thinking (especially the evangelicals!)???
Yet as a Christian I am told to love my neighbor AS MYSELF. That's a very tough command. But it is of absolute importance. In my contemporary philosophy class this semester we read a guy named Emmanuel Levinas. His basic premise that ran through all his work was the absolute obligation to the OTHER. This meant every human we come into contact with. Remarkably his thinking was shaped by his experiences surviving the Holocaust. By giving ourselves fully to the Other we lived our lives as we should. While Levinas was not a Christian, we can learn from this teaching. My neighbor is also created in the image of God and I am to love them. This can be really hard, but Jesus commands us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. As one of my favorite bands (mewithoutYou) says "so why not, let's forgive everyone everywhere everything." This is such a beautiful thought of what the Lord's prayer says "as we forgive our debtors." But why is this such a struggle?? Is there too much cynicism engrained from a culture and a world which often seems so lost and so stumbles often? Is it just a false sense of intellectual, moral, (insert anything) superiority? Or is it just simply a matter of the heart which I need to strive towards? Does this make any sense to anyone else?