Embrace the Hate
No one wants to be subjected to hate, or what they deem as something negative towards them, whatever that may be. The biggest thing right now is to do whatever is necessary, including acts of violence, in an attempt to “eliminate” hate, hateful people, and hateful ideas. Here’s something to consider: you can’t and don’t want to eliminate hate.
Wha???? What the hell? I must be a fucking racist bigot advocating Nazi’s, anti-gay, and other such bigoted, sexist, racial hate. Right?? Well, wrong. The rest of this won’t matter to a lot of you. You’ve stopped reading and are yelling at me, posting on social media, commenting about how you’ve found another white privileged, Nazi racist, sexist bigot bro. It’ll be a few commenters to your hateful spewing rant before someone actually reads the rest of this and comments that I’m not that at all, but you’re already lost.
I digress...and continue. First a backtrack: you can’t and don’t want to eliminate hate. Here’s why.
You look outside during “daylight” hours and see the sun and know that it’s light. Why? Because when you look outside during “nighttime” hours, it’s dark. You walk into a room, flip the switch and, voila!, let there be light. How about temperature? You know the difference between hot and cold, subjective, sure, but like light levels, there are also temperature levels. At a base, however, you know the difference between light and dark and hot and cold.
How about feelings? Have you experienced happiness, sadness, joy, despair, excitement, disappointment? How do you know what those are? Let’s take one: happiness vs sadness. First, understand that at a general level, feelings of happiness are not the opposite of sadness. The opposite of any feeling is the absence of feeling so feelings are on the same spectrum, not technically the opposite of. However, it is generally understood that the opposite feeling from happiness is sadness.
So, with that, have you experienced happiness? How do you know? How do you know what happiness is? Remember, light and dark? You know what light is because you know dark. So the comparison stands. If you know happiness, then you must know sadness. “Happiness is owning a puppy.” “Sadness is watching my old dog die.” Yeah, negative feeling suck. They are horrible. But, to understand and experience the positive feelings, you must know the negative.
Back to embracing the hate. You’ve experienced love, right? You know what’s coming next...how do you know? Of course the answer is because you’ve experience hate. Here’s the trick. You’ve either experienced hate by being hateful, or by someone hating you, most likely both. Yes, you’ve hated. <Blasphemy spoiler> Jesus even hated. Remember the story of him turning over the money collectors tables in his temple? Yeah, he was a little angry, hateful even.
See, it’s simple. In order to experience positive feelings like love, you must understand what that means and you do so by experiencing a negative feeling like hate. Hate is awful. I’d rather not experience it at all, but I know I must. How would I know how and if I love my kids, my wife, my dogs? I wouldn’t. Just like I wouldn’t know that it’s cold outside if I never experienced hot.
So, embrace the hate in yourself or others. Don’t act on any of that hate and don’t allow other’s to act upon their hate, like with acts of violence, but attempts to eliminate hateful feelings in yourself or others is silly.
You can’t know true love until you know true hate.
