“Hate can be a deeply stimulating emotion. The world becomes easier to understand and much less terrifying if you divide everything and everyone into friends and enemies, we and they, good and evil. The easiest way to unite a group isn’t through love, because love is hard. It makes demands. Hate is simple. So the first thing that happens in a conflict is that we choose a side because that’s easier than trying to hold two thoughts in our heads at the same time. The second thing that happens is that we seek out facts that confirm what we want to believe - comforting facts, ones that permit life to go on as normal. The third is we dehumanize our enemy… It doesn’t take long to persuade each other to stop seeing a person as a person. And when enough people are quiet for a long enough, a handful of voices can give the impression that everyone is screaming.” Fredrik Blackman From Bear Town When I first read this it struck me that much of our present inability to rule is a byproduct of this emotion. We see it in government, in the press, in discussions among friends, and in much of what is written in this forum. I feel that hate in our discourse and the need to blame our fellow citizens for our shortcomings is a major hurdle to the American greatness many speak about. Perhaps we can't replace hate with love, but we may be able to replace it by compromise for the common good.
