I know hate pretty well. When I was a kid, I hated a lot of people. My father, sometimes my mother, my teachers, the bullies down the road. Later on, I expanded the list of people I hated – bosses, company vice-presidents, corporate blood suckers, rich people in their pools, rabbis and priests, bigots and hate-spouting politicians.
As I grew older, and began to understand the toll hate had taken on me, I began to think about it. I decided to give it up, it was simply too great a burden for me to bear. I know how to hate, I did it a lot, it can flare up every now and then. The Dalai Lama says it happens to him all the time, also, this is good for me to hear. It is a fading echo in me now, I can’t quite remember the last time I really felt it.
But it is the fire of hatred that has mostly gone out in me. Life does that, the gift of aging is that we finally know something, even if it may be too l late to make use of it.
Hate makes little sense to me, it is the mark of the hollow man or woman. Hatred is always a gift to the haters of the world, who are legion. Just watch cable news. Joy C. Bell wrote that “If you want to forget something or someone, never hate it, or never hate him/her. Everything and everyone that you hate is engraved upon your heart; if you want to let go of something, if you want to forget, you cannot hate.”
There is, of course, a lot of hate out there in the world, and a lot of people who do it. It has become the sad discourse of our civic life. The Internet seems to have given haters a cheap and easy – and free – path to travel, but hatred is certainly not knew or unique to the digital world. It just can move around more freely now, and without consequence. People ask me all of the time how I deal with hatred, and there is, of course no easy answer to the question, on or offline. Honestly, I rarely run into it these days.
As a public person for a very long time, I am sorry to say many people have hated me, although I have found that their numbers correspond almost precisely to the hatred that still lives inside of me. Hate is a powerful magnet, it finds like-minded hosts in which to live. Without them, it withers and dies and hunts somewhere else.
My response to the question has become easier and more clear, at least in my mind. Hate is a provocation, a test. The gift of the hater is that he or she forces one to decide just who we wish to be, them or us. Hatred, like outrage, is an addiction, in a sense, it needs more hatred to survive and grow. Hatred is the fuel that feeds itself. Love and light are the things that kill it, every single time.
Hatred was too much for me, you can’t really hate someone else without hating yourself. I kept seeing it in the mirror. I knew that it would eat me alive, corrode my sou, infect my child, poison my love. Hatred is the great test of compassion and empathy, I have learned that I would always prefer to be hated rather than hate. I came to understand that they were the real victims, not me. Martin Luther King said he would never stoop so low as to hate someone back.
I think one of the best things I ever read about hatred came from James Baldwin. He encountered a great deal of hate and haters in his life, he wrote beautifully about hate. He said that he imagined one of the reasons people cling to their hatred so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be left only with pain. How true.
A brilliant analyst with the unfortunate task of trying to heal me in New York City said that pain and hate were twins, each eternally connected to the other. Beneath any hater, she said softly, was a terrified human being. Pity them, she said, don’t ever be them.
When I read James Baldwin, bells went off in my head, and I knew that hatred was not for me. That was not a ship I wanted to go down with or on, not a path I wanted to take. Thomas Merton, my favorite writer on the spiritual life, gave me yet another insight on hatred: “Instead of hating the people you think are war-makers, hate the appetites and disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war. If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed – but hate these things in yourself, not in another.”
And that was a good way for me to deal with hate, to look inside of me, to see every act of hatred as an opportunity for me to look at myself, to be better. Whenever someone said or did something hateful to me, I asked myself: “is this what you want to be?” It wasn’t. Sometimes in our world, this is the best course for growth imaginable. You will never resolve anything with a hater, you will never make it right. You can only do that with yourself.
And then, finally, there was Billy Graham, my unlikely pal for a few weeks when I was a reporter covering one of his crusades, teaching me in his limo late at night: “Hate will suck the blood right out of you like a vampire,”he said, “it is the song of the devil.” Wow, I thought, it can’t get any clearer than that.