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While I was writing my last piece on violence against the LGBTQ community, part of my brain kept wondering “Why do we have so much hate?” I don’t understand it, and I never have. Well, intellectually, I comprehend the base reasons for the hate that people have, but I don’t understand, on a spiritual/heart level, why people keep holding on to it or why we haven’t evolved beyond it yet.
I’ve sat and thought about humanity a lot. Human beings are such amazing things. They come in so many shapes and sizes and colors. They have these widely varied personalities and interests and abilities. They have what it takes to love and care and share and be wonderful. They can build homes and plant food and teach and create cures for disease. Humanity could be the most amazing form of life in the universe. For whatever reason though, they choose to be mired in hate. That hate saps away the time and energy that humans could be using to do amazing and wonderful things.
If I were an alien, I’d look at this planet and be stunned. Of all the things that this fleshy, carbon-based species could be doing, they’re hating each other, and looking for new ways to hate each other. They’re finding new ways to subjugate and kill each other. This must not be a very advanced species. As an alien, I’d stay as far away from this planet as I could.
Have you ever thought about it like that, from an outside perspective? People claim that how we are is “human nature” but there is so much proof to the contrary that it’s not even funny. By our nature we want to cooperate with each other, like every other species. Somewhere along the line that “superior” brain of ours got sick, and people started wanting to dominate and abuse, and they taught others to do it too. Fear set in and the abusers took over, and we’ve been fighting it ever since.
I think we all need to take a good long look at ourselves and figure out where all that hate comes from and get rid of it. Think of it like spring cleaning for your soul. Hate doesn’t help you or anyone else, it doesn’t make the world better or have any positive effect at all, so why have it? Why allow yourself to feel it? Why not replace all that hate with something that would actually be beneficial to you and to the species as a whole?
If you really think about it, hate makes no sense. It’s a useless thing. Fear can sometimes be useful, hate can’t. Think about it like a child would: “That person is different from you, so you have bad feelings about them and you do mean things to them? You saw something new, so you got worried and decided it was really bad, then you got mean about it? You are mean to people and hurt them because you don’t know them or like what they do?” From that simple, childlike point of view, it sounds pretty dumb, doesn’t it? That’s because it is.
We need to let go of all this hate we’re carrying around. It’s stupid and it’s a waste of time. If people would just educate themselves about the things they don’t understand and accept people who are different, the world could be a much better place. We could do astonishing things in the time we’d get back from that hate. If we’d stop wasting our energy on hating everything and everyone around us, we’d be able to solve so many problems and change the world. So why are people still holding on to the hate?
