The Path Of Love, The Path Of Hate
A love for one leads to a love of others, until eventually your desire and capacity to love allows you — compels you — to behave lovingly to even the most unlovable. For love is a commitment to interact with others in a way that is mutually beneficial. It is the belief that you have within you the power to make others better human beings, and that you can transfer that power onto them as well. Hatred is the inability to interact with others in a way that is mutually beneficial. Hatred dictates that mutual goals can never be attained without force and that power must be employed in order for justice to be done.
A hatred for one leads to a hatred of others, until you will behave with malice and cruelty to even those closest to you. A populace that is taught to hate those in another country are not taught critical thinking but hatred. This lesson will invariably be applied not to people of only one nation but of many nations and then all nations.
This hatred will be done in the name of a great love for one’s own nation. The greater “love” we feel for our own nation, the greater the hate we will feel for other nations. The greater hatred we feel for other nations, the more we will excuse it by saying it is done out of love for our own. But whatever walls we build, the hatred that is within us cannot be kept out. We will soon find reasons to hate certain other sectors of our own population, find reasons to believe they are not “Real Americans”. Soon, those who defend those who are not “real Americans” will themselves be worthy of our hate, and so on until when we use the word love it is only a twisted veil for the very opposite thing. You cannot fight for love with hatred in your heart. Hatred will ultimately destroy the very thing you claim you love.
We are a nation of people who claim to love our country, but we know nothing of love. Love unites, hate divides. Love is always seeking to find new ways to agree, hatred is always looking for bones of contention. Love will unite us. Love of country will not require us to hate other Americans but to find common interests in order to strengthen our country. Nor should love of country cause us to hate those in other countries but instead realize that we are all mutually dependent.
The two paths are really quite obviously different, the eventual destinations to be arrived at undeniably at opposite ends of the spectrum. If you love your country — if you are capable of loving your country — you will walk the path of love. If you walk the path of hate, well, I guess it doesn’t matter what word you use to describe your motivation for doing so.
Look around the country you live in now and ask yourself whether it is being led by those who love or those who hate. Ask yourself if we are finding ways to come together or if we are finding excuses to grow further and further apart. Then ask yourself what role you are playing in all this, and which path you are walking. Because hate WILL eventually destroy that which you claim to love.