Try love; hate’s just too tiring
One of the main things I hate … is hate.
Perhaps it would be more apropos to say, I’m tired of hate.
Let me lay that vowel down like the elders in my family would do so: I’m tah-ed of hate. OK? I’ve had my turn with harboring hate — usually paired with unforgiveness — and it did me no good.
I’ve heard many an older person say, “hey, I’m too tired/ tah-ed to deal with [whatever].” Usually, “whatever” is something that seemed to make all the difference in the world when they were younger … something to get all fired up about, something on which to expend precious energy and brain power. As I’ve aged, my priorities have shifted and I’m all about jettisoning anything likely to sap my spiritual, mental, physical, relational and emotional health. Hate is one of those things.
Hate is a word we’ve heard a lot lately, thanks to the Aug. 12 protest, by groups identified as hate groups, over the removal of a Gen. Robert E. Lee monument in Charlottesville, Va. The protest drew counterprotesters and spawned not just violence, but the death of one woman after a car slammed into a crowd.
Afterward, piggybacking off of the hours of TV coverage, came the social media storm … those who decried the hate groups and the driver who killed the counterprotester; the calling out of individual hate-group members; the frustration with the president’s reaction; the anti-hate rally the next day at our state Capitol and the call, at that event, to love.
Had I had attended the latter gathering, I might have carried a sign stating, “Choose to love. Hate is just too much doggone trouble.”
I still remember those often-fascinating public service announcements of years ago. In one, a cartoon showed an angry, hate-filled man walking. As he continued to walk, his hatred, a three-pronged pinwheel, churned in his stomach. His head grew bigger and bigger, redder and redder, until the guy exploded. The soundtrack is a man singing to guitar music: “When you hate, who do you hurt the most? Hate hurts you.” (God bless YouTube. You can find anything on there.)
That public service announcement needs to be dusted off and shown again.
It needs to be shown over and over to any one of who would hate another because that person’s skin color is different. Because that person is seen as having more favor and getting more breaks. Because that person got “our” job. Because that person got rich off our backs or appears to