Hate is tearing our fabric

After a tumultuous week for the Trump administration, the president gave a scripted speech about his plan to deal with Afghanistan. Two days later, in Phoenix, President Donald Trump went off script and gave a divisive speech, omitting his “on many sides” phrase from his prior speech denouncing the violence in Charlottesville, Va.

Blaming others for his weaknesses is a rigid dictum of the Trump presidency. In an increasingly divided country, Trump has become a provocateur. It reminds me of what it must be like to live in Afghanistan, with all of its tribal factions.

It is not that people do not see Trump’s erratic behavior. Some people just do not care.

The factionalism in the U.S. is severely ingrained. It strikes me that we can only survive this struggle if we can keep our demeanor, our manners and a sense of other people’s wellness.

Nelson Mandela said that hate was learned. It seems to me that there are people who love to hate. If hate is normalized, as it was in Nazi Germany, it becomes a dogma and a sense of perception.

In my horticultural view of life, you can’t be a leaf without knowing you are part of a tree. We are a diverse nation depending on the understanding that innate loathing lessens the entire social cohesion. Leaves come and go, but their contribution is recorded in the rings of the tree trunk. If we don’t know history, we don’t know anything.

Don Hiddleson, Millcreek, Utah