Pesky Little Four Letter Word: Hate

I am pretty lucky to have this blessed little life of mine. I sit here in this quiet, snowy countryside wonderland, and life is peaceful. I am lucky to be privileged with this peaceful life. I often relish the fact that I am living a 20 mph life in a 60 mph world. For the most part, I choose when to engage in the worlds madness. And lately, I haven’t chosen a whole lot of that chaos.

However, It does get lonely sometimes, and naturally, I turn to the outside world. Today, as I sit here in my quiet stillness, I am consumed with the nagging little four letter word “hate”. I have come to believe in my life, that Love is the only thing that really matters in the end. I want to be the change I wish to see in this world, and to do that, I must put more love out there every day. I am struck by the amount of hate in the name of “good” that I see. Hate can never come from “good”. Hate is hate, plain and simple. I don’t care if you are hating the right, hating the left, or hating for the sake of hating, when you share your judgmental memes and opinions, full of hatred and condemnation, all I see is hate. I know you. I know you as a loving human being. I know you as a person who wants to see more love in the world. I know you as someone who believes in peace, and then I see you spew your hate. Righteous, indignant, judgmental hate, and all I see is hate. We hate over politics, we hate over individual opinions, we hate with half the story and we hate with the whole story. It is becoming the mantra of our nation. Who can we hate today? Who can we smear today? Who can we be better than today? Who can we shame today? All this hatred in the name of “good”. It is so misguided. If you want to be the change you want to see, you need to be focusing on spreading love, spreading joy, and spreading light. Hating, judging, and shaming people who don’t behave as we see fit is just ugly. It is ugly on us. It makes people look at us and see hatred, darkness, and judgement. Is that who you want to be? Is that what you want the world to see? Righteous hatred is still hatred. Every time you spew it, the rest of us see hate. We see darkness.

You think your hate is justified. You think your hate will fix a situation? Somehow improve it? Since when has hate ever improved anything? Energy is multiplied. If we put out hate and judgement, that is the energy the world receives from us. We see ourselves as loving, empathetic people, until we don’t like what someone else thinks or does, and then we hate. Here is a little secret. You can’t have deep down sustainable joy if you are hosting hate. Even righteous hate. Its still dark and ugly. I am sitting here, in a somber state, feeling sad, that so many of the people that I have seen as loving, gentle souls in my life, have so much hate and judgement spewing from them.

Every time we hate, the division grows larger. The hate grows more vast. It expands, it multiplies. We judge those who are different from us, creating more judgement, more darkness, and even more divide. Take a minute, scroll through your feed. How much judgement and hate have you spewed? You see it as righteous hate. I see ugly, dark hate.

We want a change. We all want a change. And so, we hop on social media and spew more hate. We take up a cause and blindly rally for it at any cost, without seeing how the rest of the world see’s the hate we are spewing. We think ” I just cannot tolerate this behavior” and we spew it out on social media.

It doesn’t matter which side your hate is for or against. It is still hate. You feel justified in your hate because its “the right thing to do”. Since when is hate EVER the right thing to do? And what makes your “right thing to do” the standard of right and wrong? Hate solves nothing. Hate continues to divide us. Judgement divides us. Nothing gets done when we are busy hating. If we really want to be the change we want to see, then we need to love. We need to summon some maturity and set aside our childish hatred. We need to listen to each other and find compromises and solutions, rather than shaming and condemning one another. We need to take a minute to hear the other side and find a common ground. We need to compromise and meet in the middle. We need to stop for a minute, and consider, before we hit that mighty little share button, if we are spewing love or hate. How does anyone think that we can create good from hate? How does anyone think that we can create light from darkness?

People whom I have sat with, dreamed of a better way with. I see them spewing hate. People whom I have known to be the peacemakers and the healers, they are spewing hate. I implore of you, please, look at your words. Look at what you are putting out there. Does it have hate in it? Does it have judgement in it? Does it make you look like you think that you are better than others? We are all humans. We all have some things wrong. Every. Single. One. Of. Us. is wrong some of the time. Every single one of us has made mistakes, had differing opinions, and see’s things through a different color glasses than our neighbor. Each of us has a unique life experience, and those experiences shape us, and that makes each of us as unique as our fingerprints. You cannot possibly understand where each person is coming from when they form their opinions and make their decisions. I imagine if we shined a spotlight on your life, we could all find things to hate too. No one is ever going to see every issue in the same light you do. You will be lonely and sad if you limit your friends to only those who agree with you. All these “if you support such and such just unfriend me now”. Really? If I unfriended everyone who suggested that I unfriend them over a difference in opinion, I could just quit social media.

Come on people. I know you see yourselves as the lovers, healers, and peacemakers. Can we just be the bigger person? Can we agree to let the hate stop with us? Can we roll right past it and look for some love to share?

The media will always strive to divide us. They rely on ratings, and drama gets ratings. It is the nature of the beast. We cannot let them fuel our emotions and drive hatred in us. We must rise up above the hatred, and start spreading the love. Forget their ratings. Forget their emotionally driven “news’ that is manipulated to draw us in, get us emotional, and force us to take sides. I know we can do it. I know if you saw what I do when I see your latest post come across my feed, that you would be sad that I think of hate when I think of you. That I don’t see a peacemaker, I see a hater. I can’t be the only one. I see judgmental, emotionally driven responses. I see division. I see darkness and hatred. I know you, and I know that your heart carries love, and I wish you could know how the hate darkens it. I wish you could see the hate and vow to become a lover again. I long to see the healers and the peacemakers sharing love and light again.

Its lonely in my little 20 mph life sometimes, but when I venture out of it, I see hate and judgement so rampant, so prevalent. And I see a nation of people who are longing for a change. I am stuck in the thought that this hate wont bring the change we wish to see. We must remember that love is what is important. We must create more light to combat the darkness.

And so for today, I step outside my comfortable little 20 mph life, hoping and pleading with you to see the hate that you spew for what it is. To see it as the disease that it is, spreading rampantly though us. I am pleading for people everywhere to see the hate for what it is and decide to bury it. Cover it with a light that shines so bright, that it retreats to the darkness where it belongs. Let it start with you. Decide to go against the grain. Decide to hop off all of those righteous political and spiritual bandwagons, and just start thinking about how you can add light to someones day today. Scroll past the judgement, block the hate. Let it die with you. Bury it, and let the love shine from you instead. Please.

Can we all just please try? Try to judge one less person today. Try to bless one more person today. Spread your love. Spread your light. Let the hate die at your fingertips.

This post is rather out of character for me. I rarely give things like hate the time of day. I am uncomfortable as I hit publish, because I really want to be a source of loving light. I really want to be the change I wish to see, and right now, I just wish to see a stop to the rampant hate. And so, today I beg. I plead. I implore of you, to just take a look within.

What are you spewing?