Hate - The New Enemy

By the miracle of Google, my once abandoned blogs are still around.  Finding them still on the internet was like receiving a forgotten Christmas present.  I will continue writing here with the magic that the previous post was 17 years ago.

My last post was about a mass shooting.  The prescription I recommended was not taken and mass shootings haven't subsided, they have increased.  My premise was that these events were caused by our own self-centeredness, that we only care about ourselves and everybody else be damned (and dead).

This may or may not still be the case, but a new enemy has emerged and that enemy is hate.  Americans have always had hate in our society and it has waxed and waned over the decades.  But something about hate changed.  I know it's more complicated than this, but I can trace a big part of it to the 2016 Presidential Election Campaign.  Two key people played a major role in changing society.  

Donald Trump took the opportunity to demonize every other candidate and literally everyone who disagreed with him.  Hillary Clinton used the campaign to designate half of the population as "deplorables."  These were the winners of their parties' nominations.  What happened was that, much different than in prior eras, hate was no longer an emotion that should be avoided and one that reflected negatively on the person hating.  Hate had become acceptable.  Hating was something to be proud of.

What started as "I Hate Trump," and "Crooked Hillary" has grown to almost completely encompass our society.  There is no longer a difference of opinion.  Nobody examines another person's actions and weighs the pros and cons and makes a judgment based on that analysis.  Now it's 100% good or 100% bad.  And real (honest) life isn't like that.

Think of all the 100% hate that we have today.  Trump, Biden, McConnell, Pelosi, Hamas, Israel, gays, homophobes, blacks, whites, climate change, abortion, immigration.  This list goes on and on.  But the one thing that's different now is that there is no middle ground.  (There might actually be a middle ground but the major media outlets won't share those views).  When is the last time you heard a discussion where someone says, "I agree with six of your points, but I disagree with four of them.  Let's move forward with the things we agree on."?  It never happens because, today, if you agree with anything your opponent says you are deemed to have conceded to their entire position and you are the loser of the debate.

With hate, you don't need a reason.  Hate is the reason.  I killed those people ... because they were gay, ... because they were Jews, ... because they were Christians, ... because of their skin color, ... because of their political affiliation.  You get the point.  I'm pretty sure you haven't killed anybody, looted any businesses, demonstrated in front of someone's private residence, but one hell of a lot of people have spewed their hate in writing, in person, and most often on the anonymous internet.  (Note that "I'm 100% right and you are 100% wrong" is just another version of intolerance which is not much different than hate).

When people believe their outright hatred is acceptable they sometimes do things that most people still believe are unacceptable.  And hatred is now acceptable because so many people do it and so many people tolerate it.

You might say that it's your business if you truly hate some person or some group and it's none of my business, but is that really true?  In his famous poem No Man Is An Island,  John Donne writes, "Every man is a piece of the continent, A part of the main." Stated differently, what you do affects other people.  We've all seen the domino arrays where dominos are stood on their narrow side in a long line and somebody topples the first domino and it knocks over the second one and the second one does the same to the third.  The dominoes go racing and usually end with a spectacular finish.

When you hate just for the sake of hating, it's like your are pushing over the first domino.  The spectacular ending could involve an AR-15.  Did you cause that?  Even in a little way?  Another amazing part of the domino array is that if you remove one single domino from the line the whole thing stops.  No more dominoes fall over and no spectacular ending.

So you have a choice.  You can continue with unprincipled hate, start the domino chain, and wait for the spectacular ending.  But you can also step out of the line and stop the whole thing in its tracks.  You might not be able to change the whole world, but you can change your part of it.