In the wake of a heart-wrenching national tragedy, it is important to shed light upon the importance of love amongst a tornado of hatred, a windstorm of anger, a vortex of fear. It’s important to let your fellow humans feel the warmth of radiant sunshine amongst an incredible storm.
William Shakespeare once wrote, “In time we hate that which we often fear.” After the tragic event of the Pulse Shooting swept our nation, we view it as an opportunity to butt heads on where we stand on gun control. We use it to build our own hatred toward a religion we stereotype into being violent. We use a tragedy to build our personal empires of anger and hate.
I don’t care if that vein in your neck threatens to burst every time a person says, “We need better gun control.” I don’t care if you oh-so-clearly recognize ISIS has trickled into the mind of a crazed American made its presence on our U.S. soil. I don’t care if your knuckles are white from clinging so tightly to your guns. I don’t care if your heart is pounding in a repetitive loop saying “we need more guns.” I don’t care if you’ve allowed ignorance to clot your arteries so much so where you feel the need to be intolerant towards an entire religion. I don’t care about your views on politics. I don’t care if you want to make America great again or if you’re rah-rah women for a matriarchal society. I don’t care.
I care about you as a person, but I don’t give a damn about your fire-spit opinion. I give a damn about our fellow human beings –– you know the ones –– they breathe the same air, walk the same roads and pledge their allegiance to the same unwavering red-white-and-blue flag. You know the ones, our brothers and sisters of this nation we call our home.
United, we stand. Are we? Or is that some sugar-coated slogan we paste on our bumpers and above the register of our American-goods-only store? We are nation that prides itself on being united, respecting one another despite our differences, yet we are not. We are divided because of our differences. We do not love each other as brother and sister –– even though we should.
Shooting after shooting, we do not interlock the spaces of our fingers to stand hand-in-hand. No, one mass killing after another, we drift apart. We pride ourselves on being such a great nation, an elusive hand extended offering a pursuit of a fruitful life, coining it the “American Dream.” Yet we do not stand together. We use our differences to “strengthen” and solidify our own opinions. We use our differences to point our fingers instead of seeing the finger is pointed right back at us. We are a nation divided.
We fail to see when a fire is ignited within our borders that adding fire will only cause the fire to grow and expand, swallowing us. We fail to see the only way to kill a fire is to not fuel it. We fail to the only way to extinguish the fire is to band together and use our love for our nation, for each other, for good. We fail to see because we are a nation that would rather burn itself than let someone else watch us burn knowing they were the cause.
We need not to let our hearts blacken with hate. We need not to let our minds become opaque with judgment. We need not let ourselves become jaded with anger. We need to learn to love each other as brother and sister of a nation, as fellow human beings. We need to stop lifting our fingers, searching for someone to blame. We need to stop clinging to our guns, veins pulsing from our foreheads from yelling our beliefs. We need to let go of our insistence to be right.
Instead of asking who’s to blame, who to target, and where to focus your hate, ask yourselves, how can we make this better? How can we and what can we learn from this? How can we extend our hands out to help instead of slapping each other?
Remember –– those who are no longer with us were people just like you and I. They had families, people who adored them, people who respected them. They had people who loved them and people they loved. They were murdered in a place where they felt they belonged, in a place they thought they were safe –– a place they should be safe. We need to remember this and be both sympathetic and empathetic to our citizens, to our people.
We need to remember what it means to love. Love with a heart so open and full, you’ll fear it’ll float up into the atmosphere. Love with a mind so elastic, it will expand to understand and appreciate the people you didn’t think you could get along with. Allow your heart to forgive, allow your heart to feel compassion. Allow yourselves to assist and help those in a time of desperate grief, a time of confusion, a time of confusing and unbearable pain. Allow yourself to not become so rooted in your beliefs you forget what it means to be a kind human being.
To love means to accept people’s differences without letting it build judgment and tear us apart. To love means to try to understand people’s perspectives instead of focusing on your sole viewpoint. To love means to ignore stereotypes. To love means to acknowledge your fear, but disallow it to consume you. To love means to understand we are all allowed to make mistakes and to accept people do and make mistakes. To love means to understand our flaws and others’ flaws. To love means to be consistently trying to be better and empathetic, even when we allow sparks of hate and anger to enter our fiery blood. To love is to be understanding, supportive, courageous and compassionate. To love means to be human.
I ask you, as citizens of this nation we call our home, as fellow human beings, open your heart to love. I challenge you to ignore the dark emotions clouding your soul. It’s so easy to hate. Don’t.
Love is a power. Use it.
