A Facebook friend of mine recently lamented in one of her posts, that she has never seen more hate in her lifetime. She was referring to a recent killing of one of our heroes in blue. I understand how she feels. I while I agree that there has been a number of hateful, egregious incidents of late, for me, it’s not more than I’ve seen in my lifetime. I’ve seen the hate.
My generation is the tail-end of the baby boomers. Born in the late fifties, we’re nearly the last of that remarkable period of growth. During that timeframe our parents, siblings and friends endured a lot of anxiety and fear. Today, it seems our memories are short. If it’s not the news of today, we tend to push it under a rug and ignore it. Despite its long term effects, we tend to feel that we should get over it and move along. But those of us that have witnessed and experienced the violence that often accompanies hate, have a much more difficult time sweeping it under the rug and “getting over it and moving on”. Those of us who were children in the fifties and sixties should know better.
You see, there was a time in our country when we felt our nation was going to explode. We were involved in a war in Southeast Asia; thousands of our very own countrymen fought daily for the basic human rights of all; there were violent and deadly riots in our major cities; we were fighting a bitter Cold War with a country that we felt was an evil empire threatened the stability of the entire world; protests against the war swept across our nation; and the Middle East exploded in war. Our country and the world was a mess.
I was a paperboy during that timeframe in a northeastern Ohio city. Daily, when the papers were delivered to me, before I delivered them to my customers, I took the time to read the news from from the front page to the last page. I knew what businesses and companies in my town were hiring, how the Indians and Browns were doing, what stores had a sale going on, how to plant flowers, and of course, how many people were killed on any given day. Our paper was full of tragedy. Soldiers were being killed in Vietnam. Blacks were being hosed, jailed and murdered in their fight for equal rights. Communism was the evilness that pervaded our American way of life and those people who associated with the party were ostracized and even jailed. Every day, there were images of entire villages being destroyed in Southeast Asia. There were photos of individuals being hosed, beaten and lynched, because of their involvement in the Civil Rights Movement. We thought a nuclear attack was imminent and so, we had fallout shelters and practiced nuclear preparation under our desks. Police in riot gear carried bayonets and fought back young kids who were seeking a peaceful resolution to the war. Urban areas exploded with riots because of the daily injustices those living there had to endure. We lost three great American leaders to assassins bullets.
So, I’ve seen hate. Yet, during all of that strife in the fifties and sixties, we managed to enact the Civil Rights Amendment, began the demolition of Jim Crow laws and ways in the South, landed on the moon, integrated most of the major universities by the end of the sixties, and enacted programs that helped our nation’s poor. Because despite all the hate and tragedy around us, we knew then, as we should know now, that the only prescription for hate is love.
Times are difficult and sometimes hateful. But what’s happening today is being heightened by social media. Because of the immediacy of the Internet, we know sooner, so we react sooner. Oftentimes when we react, instead of reacting with love, we fight hate with more hate. That has to stop.
Let’s fight the good fight. Let’s meet hate with rational, unadulterated, love. Then we’ll win.
