I feel or try to feel sadness instead of hatred toward the misguided people who protested and rioted at the Capitol because I’ve often hated people regarding various political issues.
I struggled with that 20 years while doing LGBTQ activism and encountering homophobic people, as well as more recently when I caught myself fantasizing about killing George Zimmerman.
Last summer I had to work on not feeling hatred toward police and toward various people I encountered who acted as if the protesters were victimizing the police and people who said Black Lives Matter were “terrorists who hate white people.”
In my experience, amid the pressure of some conflict situations, there are only two options : feel sadness or feel hatred toward those who seem to embody what I find to be morally repugnant.
When I am sad, I can still think clearly and have self-control, which is important for being useful in the community. But hatred addles.
Anger can be very useful, but hatred seems to detract from the mental and physical health of individuals doing important community work.
Hatred also seems to disorient social movements and make them more vulnerable to infiltration by agents provocateurs.
In addition to being spiritually damaging, hatred makes well-focused activist messaging more difficult, thereby enabling media distortions. Hatred makes self-disciplined strategic nonviolence more difficult.
I’m not judging others. It is probably harder to not hate when one has been gravely wronged, whether thru oppression such as racism, or thru non-politically motivated interpersonal violence.
But hatred’s adverse effects on communities’ ability to organize seem apparent. Obviously, relatively privileged people shouldn’t judge or preach to oppressed people about not hating or about being nonviolent in their liberation struggles.
But people should support one another and focus on liberation with a clear mind, and help to lift one another up whenever a person understandably struggles with hatred.
An analogy might be this : a person whose child has been murdered understandably wants to exact revenge especially when the shock and raw pain of the loss is fresh, but in most situations fellow community members don’t encourage the aggrieved to act on that. Instead they pull together to think clearly about what it is that they can do.
Even high-brow liberal publications such as the Atlantic, Harpers, the New York Times, and others generally promote the belief in “American Exceptionalism” with its ideas about the US promoting democracy around the world, despite the fact that the US government has in numerous cases smashed democratic aspirations around the world, and installed or prolonged dictatorships in order to secure the interests of US-based transnational corporations.
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