Hate is a Dead End
The pervasive use of hatreds to build power is the worst crime of the Trump Administration
Our descent into hatred is the worst part.
Hatred is a powerful emotion and an almost completely destructive one, even in the most extreme circumstances. It leads us to destruction and self-destruction of the very worst kind.
Even those who study warriors and war know that the best soldiers are motivated by love of their comrades far more than hatred of the enemy. The transmutation of hatred into love is one of the most miraculous aspects of being human.
-- The mother who converts her anger at the drunk driver who kills her child into a movement of “Mothers against Drunk Driving.”
-- The high school student who devotes their life to gun regulation and mental health support after witnessing a school shooting.
-- The researcher who finds a cure for the disease that killed her parent.
These are the benefits of adversity, the blessings of a skinned knee, and the uses of the idea of evil, enabling us to find the best in ourselves. To know the good by contemplating or experiencing its opposite.
The human endeavor is a story of connection and mutual support in search of that idea of “the good.” We know that cooperation and collective action is the clear path to a better outcome for all.
But the temptations to defect, to act alone, and to self-maximize in the short term are very great. Our society has come to worship individual action in ways that are fundamentally destructive.
Our leaders would use our hatreds and anger to drive us apart, to lash out in destructive and self-destructive ways, to convince us that powerful men using violence can solve our problems.
They cannot. The only way out is through, past our anger and hatred into love, cooperation, and trust, as best we can manage it.
There are deep biological reasons for us to mistrust each other and deep societal reasons for us to violate mutual trust. We know better. Over time that knowledge must overcome our biology and reform our society.
That is the work to be done.
How do we move the needle on this?
David - your voice and clarity of vision grows and are strength for us - Monique’s vision of acting locally from your own center of compassion and confidence resonates with me - we the people elected this vintage of haters, perhaps as you posted recently, as a backlash to decades of selfishness and elitism - the emerges of collective local enactment of compassion on the global scale appears to be our lasting salvation - this is the underpinning message I read in bill gate’s redirection of strategy in addressing climate change.