| In honor and remembrance of those lost today |
I don't know what is wrong with this country. It's disheartening to see ourselves so hell-bent on our own destruction. With the recent shootings in Aurora and now at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, I'm starting to wonder what we stand for as a country.
It's easy to talk in high terms about society and what we should and shouldn't do, promote, condone, or condemn. But let's take a much more personal view of this. I want everyone that is reading this to try to be introspective for just a second.
A. We, myself included, LOVE to post bullshit on Facebook that makes us seem deep or enlightened. We quote the Dalai Lama, random gurus, Lao Zi(Tze), Confucius, and every other philosopher that our freshmen seminar taught us about. We LOVE the idea of the universal idea of love. But have we thought about hate.
Why is it that we refuse, on both an individual level and as a society, to acknowledge that hate is also universal. One person's hate is no more hateful than any other persons. We like to qualify hate to our own interests, and it isn't just conservatives or evangelicals, but liberals as well. For example, this recent shooting at the Sikh temple. When it turns out to be a fanatic white guy with evangelical Christian beliefs, going to shoot some rag heads, singing "Onward Christian Soldiers", 90% of white Americans will give his Christian beliefs a pass. He will be classified as a deranged man who had violent and perverse tendencies, and at the end of the day, lost his shit. Though this will be classified, as it should, as an "domestic terrorist-like act", I questions this:
1. Will his family be subject to scrutiny in the way that Muslim "extremists" families are? Case in point Secretary Clinton's Assistant Chief of Staff Huma Abedin?
2. If he turns out to be a Christian extremist, will we start questioning the basis of Christianity as generally violent, just like so many commentators have said about Islam? Case in point "Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace but a sword." Matthew 10:34
3. Will his affiliation with other groups mean that those groups are guilty by association? Case in point, http://mediamatters.org/research/2010/11/12/fox-continues-its-guilt-by-association-smears-o/173261
We wish to qualify all of our hatred, as if hatred born from causes or belief that we believe in or are sympathetic to, are some how different that other hate. We believe that those people are somehow not representative of the flaws of that particular set of beliefs. THEY are just outliars, and WE do not believe in hate. Sorry, folks, hate is universal, and I wish we condemned hate in all of it's forms. Just as we embrace love in all of its forms.
