TRYING TO UNDERSTAND

 By Ruth A. Sheets

I have wondered most of my life where and how one acquires the hatred that permits things like slavery; concentration, internment, and death camps; beating up people trying to cross a bridge to march for rights those with the clubs and weapons refuse to permit them; Destroying whole villages because one can (It’s war you know); killing protesters; kneeling on the neck of a man on the ground for more than 9 minutes and no one intervening; stopping food from getting to people in desperate need, even killing people as they move to collect the needed supplies; separating children from their parents with no record of who those children’s parents are; throwing to the ground and handcuffing a US senator for properly asking a question of a public official; attempting to erase the history of everyone but those currently in charge. 

The excuses for the bad behavior, the various levels of atrocity have come down to us over time including such favorites as:  they aren’t really human and don’t feel pain the way WE do; they don't deserve any better  because they are cheats, takers  (today's Republicans in Congress); they killed Christ (a Christian cry through the ages which is false because it was Rome, according to Christian scriptures); they are a threat so we need to keep them out or where we can see what they are doing (this one is frequent from Japanese internment during WWII to Gaza, to torture prisons to police surveillance and more); they don't belong in a nice neighborhood like ours, it will bring property value down. 

Yes, we have seen it all our lives.  The excuses keep on coming and somehow we buy them.  There are folks whose job it is to  come up with acceptable excuses as to why the deed was necessary or couldn’t be helped or one bad apple or an accident or something.  The goal seems to be to normalize or make the act acceptable or to control those, you know, the ones not like us or who would change our way of life.  I am guessing those who believe those excuses need a way to understand what is going on and to think they are not responsible for the cruelties, the evil that is perpetrated against folks they know are human beings, often in their name.

I see 4 emotions that move human beings into committing atrocities:  anger, resentment, fear, and hatred.  There are others like greed, feelings of superiority, indifference, and contempt, all enhanced and encouraged by the four emotions, hatred being the most potent, generally necessary for most of the cruelty.  

We need to find ways of stopping the hate before it festers into something deadly and destructive.  People do a lot of hating.  It is a kind of wall that keeps us from even trying to understand people and situations different from our own, a kind of comfort food.  It can let us “know” who is out to get us or who deserves to be a target of our hate.  The folks who push the hatred have their own reasons/needs:  taking over their land, keeping communities free of their kind, keeping people poor so wealth can accumulate for the already-too-rich, fear that they may be as good as I am even though they are different from me, competition.  There are an untold number of reasons emotions can lead to hatred, stoked by others or home-grown within ourselves.

Is there a way to reach through the screens often deliberately set up between us and them?  I think so, but it is going to have to be done at many levels at the same time. 

• Our media need to present all kinds of people working successfully together at simple as well as complex tasks.
• - History classes and courses need to show the atrocities as well as those who stood against them at the times they were occurring.  There have always been protesters, just often their acts were covered up.  In recent years, many books have been written to describe the work of the many resistance groups in Europe during the Nazi regime through the Holocaust.  Americans protested the removals of Indigenous people here, but their acts of courage were dismissed because they didn’t fit the mission.
• - People opposed slavery even from the early years.  Those protesters, abolitionists were often imprisoned, killed, and villainized by the slavery industry, with government assistance.
• Americans have protested every war and the war machine that promotes war while the supporters of the wars were claiming it is necessary in all instances.  Some of the conflicts/wars did help to protect this nation and our allies, but others protected private interests of industry and other entities.
• - People have stood with immigrants throughout our history, noting their massive contributions to every aspect of our lives, trying to stop the lies “stealing American jobs” (only the immigrants of color, of course).

We have seen the pain, destruction and death lies have caused over time around the world:  Ruanda, Nazism, government-sanctioned torture, police brutality, made-up excuses for war as in Iraq, are only a few of the horrors generated by people who should have known better, but drummed up the anger, fear of the other, resentment, leading to hatred that are responsible for millions of deaths just in the past few decades, and hundreds of millions in the 20th century.  

It is difficult to set hatred toward others aside when the presidents of the United States and other nations are pumping out hatred for their own purposes and people are picking it up and running with it like a football, hoping to make a touchdown.  We the People here and elsewhere could stop a lot of this by considering what the accusations against others really are and who is making and benefiting from them.

• We can examine our religion/faith to see if the hatreds being spewed match our faith – if one is Christian, hatred is not a Christlike act no matter how one colors that hatred.
• - Stop watching, scrolling, listening to hatred being pumped out by folks who clearly have a resentment toward others.
• - Think before speaking something that accuses others of crimes it is not likely they could or would have committed (running a pedophile ring in the basement of a Pizza shop).
• - Stop hating people you don’t understand:  LGBTQ persons, women who make family decisions different from your own, people who don’t share your color or ethnicity or gender, as a start.

Dropping the instant knee-jerk hate response can be a whole lot healthier for us all then clutching hate and the other negative emotions to one’s breast as though they are sacred and godsent; they’re not.  We can do this if we have the desire to shut down our willingness to buy into the hate feast that is constantly being dished out to us by despicable people in power as well as ordinary people who forgot that hatred is like a cancer that can metastasize and eventually kill or destroy.  We can do this if we do it in solidarity with others, each doing our part!