It’s no mystery that hate exists in the world we live in.
It is written in our history books, it has destroyed civilizations, it kills innocent beings. Hate has taken power over even the strongest of empires and nations. Hate is smart, for it mutates and adapts to new circumstances, it has a new face for each and every setting. It grows stronger with abundance. It preys on the weak. But hate didn’t climb the ladder on its own, for hate’s greatest ally is ignorance. Together, the duo conspires and plots and fights mercilessly. They reject the facts and make up their own. With the help from their comrade, fear, they creep into the minds of the vulnerable and begin projecting their lies to the masses. Their victories are measured in violence, in discrimination, in shaming and in death. And the millions of victories they have notched on their belts are not enough, for hate and ignorance don’t grow tired of being hateful and ignorant. Like something of an invisible intoxicant, the hate and ignorance pair cloud even the greatest of judgement; they project an entirely warped sense of reality. They are professionals in making pure and legitimate logic seem like total folly. They will shamelessly continue to plague the world by all means necessary. Sometimes on the sly, making moves when no one is watching. Sometimes in disguise, playing the role of a world leader.
Sometimes front and center, right before our eyes.
Hate succeeds the most, however, when it weakens its greatest enemy: love. Ignorance prevails when its opponent is delegitimized: knowledge. When love is stigmatized as being naïve and knowledge is no longer valued, hate and ignorance thrive. They become the norm, they’re allowed to come out of hiding, they no longer need to creep and whisper their way into minds, they yell at us from our televisions and hypnotize us through our cell phones. They impose their agenda and it’s accepted by the millions. When love becomes rusty and dull while hate gets sharper and sexier, we become a slave to it. We’re forced to do hate’s dirty work, whether it be blaming and ridiculing a specific group of people for the issues of the world, or standing on the front line and pulling triggers on the innocent. We come to be ignorance’s bitch when we start believing its lies and sharing them with others, ignoring the research that thousands of people have devoted their entire lives to, tearing out the pages of history books and tossing them in the trash.
And right now, hate and ignorance believe they are winning.
Alas, just as anything else, they are flawed. They are cocky and they are arrogant. As they’re clinking glasses in celebration and laughing at the evil they’ve managed to spread in the world, they’ll forget to watch their back, forget their enemies that are dusting themselves off and growing stronger. They’ll forget the true power and potential of love and knowledge, and the countless allies they have in their back pockets.
If we have let hate slip through the cracks, we can send love after it. If we’ve allowed ignorance to entrance us, we can fight back with knowledge. The mistakes that are made when under the influence of hate are hard to undo, but with love in the forefront, with peace as the agenda and with knowledge covering our flanks, it’s possible. It must be a collective movement, for when we all come together and move forward only with love, compassion, acceptance, knowledge, forgiveness and peace, we defeat the common enemy, we defeat hate.
Love will triumph. Knowledge will overcome.
