about hate

Continuing on my series of blogs on how I believe we can bring about peace, I am inevitably brought to the subject of hate.

Hatred, in my humble and meaningless opinion, is nothing more than a plague of human thinking; a virus with causes, and cures. It is, of all the emotions we feel, the only one that is taught and learned.

Think about it if you will. When watching small children play, we see happiness occur naturally. We see jealousy, fear, anger, and sadness all occur naturally. What we do not see is hatred. It is not natural. It is not a part of the human psyche until it is put there by some exterior influence.

Parents teach kids to hate from an early age. Everyone knows this. What we do not consider is how we teach our own selves to hate. We lie about the nature of our hatred and we use the sentence “I hate that” to cover up our own fears and insecurities because we are unwilling to let go our ignorance, or at least admit that it is there.

Look at the current climate in the United States. Hate has been woven into the very fabric of this society. It has been born of fear, a fear created for the purposes of political gain, and it has spread like wild fire through the entire country. Then, the fear, fueled by ignorance, allowed the Bush administration to plow forward, unchallenged, with their war profiteering agenda.

I am not trying to use this as a chance to attack Bush, I am simply saying ignorance = fear = hate = war; the opposite of peace; the point being that hate is not an emotion in and of itself, but dependent on other causes.

So how do we combat this? Education. Education. Education.

Look at hate groups in this country; the KKK, Hammerskins, Aryan’s, the Fred Phelps clan, and the people calling for the “nuking” of the Mid-East. If these people weren’t so ignorant, the hate they harbor would have no foundation, and therefore be unable to exist.

Thus, it is up to all of us to do our part to educate people. Killing hate starts with accepting that we cause it. We must let go this idea that hate will always be here; we must stop looking at it as a simple emotion and acknowledge that WE cause it and WE can cure it.

If there is a road to peaceful existence, then curing hatred has to be the foundation it is built upon.

I hope you think about this the next time you hear someone say they hate something. When you do, ask them, “Do you really?”