In the first part of the century the hatred was a toxic soup for the masses. If you didn't stop to think for yourself you'd be swept away in the kind of tide that leads to holocaust scenarios. Because of ISIS, perhaps a few hundred people at best, we were being scared into a hatred of one and half billion muslims: babies, toddlers, boys, girls, teens, women, men, elderly. If one and a half billion people on earth were evil I think we would have noticed earlier. I'd met muslims and every single one of them, no exceptions, was a beautiful human being. They loved, they had deep feelings, they showed kindness and generosity of spirit. So who were we supposed to be hating? The terrorists? Their actions certainly, we know murder and fear mongering is wrong. But who was pumping these images into our homes? They couldn't. Who was really spreading the fear and what was the purpose?
We and our kids were being conditioned to hate an entire group of the human race. I am not of their religion, but they were and still are my brothers and sisters in humanity. Girls were afraid to wear a simple headscarf in public in western democracies. Not so long ago women did so in England to protect their hair from the wind, it's just a piece of fabric, not a gun, not a bomb...just fabric. Fear from the media was like a dog sent in to herd sheep. It took us time to realize that the next time we saw that "dog" we shouldn't run. We were to turn and ask what the fuck it was doing in our "pen" and start thinking for ourselves, educate ourselves. We started making muslim friends, and never once did we regret it. Over time we learnt that though we hailed from different cultures, Love bound us together more strongly than any divisions could separate us.
Hatred is all that is left. I buried them with my own hands, their tiny bodies into the soil, eyes closed. I kissed them before the dirt covered them and in that touch love left my body forever. Without it all I can focus on is revenge. I want them dead, all of them, every last one. I want the man who dropped the bombs from an office far away to know his children are dead before I cut his throat. What then? I have no idea. I don't care what's next, that's where I finish.
I can honestly say I don't hate anyone, I never have. I guess that makes me a freak in this world. Even in betrayal the mechanism to turn it into hatred fails, instead my mind seeking to understand their behaviour from a compassionate point of view. Why did they do it? What is it about them that lead them to such a bad decision? I don't keep folks around that hurt me over and over, failing to learn even a little from each life lesson, it isn't a good idea. The greatest predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour. I just hope that in time hatred is seen for the pointless waste of time it is and that when we see it we begin to understand that it is a marker of love misused.
Hatred is such an abomination, a subversion of what should be good. I never see strong hatred except where love is betrayed or destroyed in some manner. We hate our ex-lovers more strongly than a person who steals our wallet. We make excuses for strangers and hold our loved ones to impossible standards. Yet in the bleak landscape of hatred there are always paths back to understanding and empathy, though sometimes they are barely threads in a vast wilderness of negative emotion.
Hatred masquerades as an ointment to hurt when in truth it is no more than gasoline for the flames. More hatred only guarantees more enmity, more pain, more death ahead, never more healing or an increase in our humanity. It can be passed like a dark flame from one generation to the next, burning cold, waiting for the next opportunity for genocide and war. While conditions aren't right it bides its time in the shadows as racism and slander, feelings of superiority and echoes of tribalism. Once the opportunity arises - an economic downturn, hunger or natural disaster it comes in fast to override our better natures, making us more primal ape than human. Hatred, the twin of wrath, is never our friend. Hatred makes us all weaker, a poison transmitted via ill-thought out words.
In that time the spreading of hatred was child's play. Get a false name or twenty and troll the news articles. News articles were the shock to paralyze the brain, let the sheep scroll down to comments to find out what they should think about it all. Feed them racism, bigotry and hate - all of them are cheaper than compassion. Compassion costs money, war brings in the cash.
Hatred brings me to kill you and you to kill me. Hatred tells me that your unborn children should be exterminated and you that mine are no more than vermin. Hatred climbs under our skin and pumps fear into our veins, switching off any part of our minds that should protest. Hatred convinces us that others will come to harm those we love and the only way out is to end their lives first, for without the abuse of loving feelings hatred is too weak to cause damage.
My body lost its strength long ago. My mind shattered and the rest of me followed suit. Without the hatred I'd die, there isn't any part of me that feels anything else. Without it I'd be nothing, feel nothing, so why eat? Why sleep? Why continue to breathe? But I have the hate, my only companion in the wilderness we call existence. It is the fuel that keeps my heart pumping and brain ticking over. Revenge is coming. It's coming real soon.