How did they get us to hate one another, to be so filled with hate and anger? To lose our sense of empathy and compassion?

I don’t believe that is who we are, and I certainly don’t intend for it to be who I am.

The election of 2016 was a selfish but obvious gift to me, it was an importunity for me to understand who I wished to be, and who I did not with to be. It promoted the deeply satisfying and transforming idea of the Army Of Good, and deepened my search for a spiritual life almost beyond my imagination.

I don’t aspire to sainthood, the very idea of perfection turns my stomach. I am broken and flawed, and make no secret of it. But I don’t have to let them make me hate.

I think I always knew, perhaps from my time as a journalist, media critic and political writer,  that hatred in civic life was rarely about ideology, but much more apt to be about money.

Money has become the American cause, the point, the national faith. Religions like Christianity have been corrupted or pushed to the side, or hopelessly manipulated and exploited.

The last few years have sustained that idea I had about hatred and money.

I have one friend who rails about Fox News, and another who despises – that’s the word he used – MSNBC.

I told him I was surprised that an experienced and educated lawyer like him didn’t understand that these corporate media entities have no ideology, they do not have a moral or ethical rationale for their work, or for the consequences of what they do.

They worship their stockholders, not the American Experiment.

They are each making an enormous amount of money staking out their different marketing positions. From the Weather Channel to Cable News,  you might have noticed that hate and fear are big money-makers. In America, that is the new gold.

Rupert Murdoch is well-known in Australia and England for being quite liberal in his politics and personal life. The people running MSNBC are not radical progressives, they are white-shirt corporate bureaucrats in a vast media system that makes hundreds of millions of dollars.

Their values are as deep as their profits, no deeper. They can and will change on a dime as their demographics shift.

Hate and fear makes money, love and compassion simply do not.

That’s why the Weather Channel is quick to name systems we used to call “storms” by human names. It’s not because we need it, it’s because advertisers love it.  Mayhem and fear is as good for the weather media as it is for political campaigns.

The Democratic Party raised a staggering amount of money this year promoting hatred for Donald Trump, and terror about his reign.

the Republican Party learned this profitable trick years ago, they and their corporate sponsors have made vast sums of money promoting progressivism as a liberal conspiracy to ruin our world.

People are much more prone to donate large sums of money in the Corporate Nation when they hate. Just think of that once notorious “caravan” of impoverished mothers and shoeless children coming to cross our borders, steal our jobs, and rape and pillage our communities.

You might be forgiven for forgetting them, the media has long forgotten them.

Not too long ago, the institutions that governed and shaped our civic life promoted connection and unity and worked against hatred and vision. Hate was universally considered a bad thing, our institutions joined together to fight against it.

They never wiped out hatred, but mostly kept it at bay.

Those institutions included politics and religion and the companies and promise of technology.

As the Corporate Nation grew, the role of those institutions changed. I knew the Rev. Billy Graham well, I reported on his crusades. I never heard him utter a hateful or divisive word, he preached unity, understanding, tolerance, listening and compassion.

His son Franklin has helped turn the Christian Evangelical Movement, for so many years a force for good,  into just another political hate group.

The leaders of our political parties encourage us to hate our opposition, each accusing the other of the worst kinds of treachery and dishonesty.

Graham’s  Evangelical Movement today openly promotes hatred and greed and the pursuit of political power over democracy and Christ’s true teachings. And the President acknowledges quite openly that hatred and division is a political tool that helps get him elected.

Technology, once praised by the likes of Walt Disney and Lyndon Johnson as a miraculous revolution that improved our our lives, has become its own nightmare, spewing anger and division and false information.

Technology bombards us, it no longer primarily expands our horizons and comforts us.

Throughout this all is the corruption of money – money and politics, money and technology, money and Christianity, once the beacon of morality and hope in our world. Pope Francis, a deeply spiritual and inspiring leader, is a freak in his own Church, marginalized and pushed to the side. They seem to hate him.

Certain special people – corporate people mostly – have caused us to feel disconnected, even deranged.

I see nothing but hope in this, not despair. We are called upon to decide for ourselves whether or not we choose to hate one another. Even the corporations and political leaders cannot force me to hate. That is up to me, that is my choice, that is our choice.

Ironically, choosing not to hate each other is not a radical political position, it separates us from the left and the right, from our own media and political leaders, from the very technology we have been manipulated into using all day every day.

There is no escaping all of this hate,  short of digging a tunnel and moving in. Hate is comforting to some, malignant to me. I can’t change the haters, they would never listen to me, they have to find their own way through this swamp.

But I can pray for me and for them, not really in a religious sense, but in a spiritual one.

How do I fight back? How do I keep my feet on the ground?

Simple really, I channel my anger into the idea of doing good, and when I feel pulled towards hate, I stop and ask myself who I am, and who I wish to be? I don’t have to be a saint to do good.

And then I try to think of another small act of great kindness. There is no shortage of opportunities or ideas.

I am surrounded now by people I have mostly never met who choose not to hate. They don’t have as much money as the corporations, or the power of  their profitable hate machines and politicians.

But they have a lot more heart, and they give me hope for the future of my world. Good and evil have always competed to conquer the world, I will not live to see the end of that struggle.

But nobody can make me hate, not even the most powerful people in the world.

We always have a place to go, as long as we can see the world honestly and clearly. That is our choice, our opportunity. Perhaps it’s a new calling.