Blessed are the countless wisdom-keepers in our midst.
May we be among them. — Molly
This is excerpted from a chapter in Anne's
latest beautiful book entitled "Don't Let
Them Get You To Hate Them."
How did we become so filled with hate? This is not who we are. Hate is the worse emotion of all, second only to acute jealousy.
Certain special people of late have caused a majority of us to experience derangement. Some of us have developed hunchbacks, or tics in our eyelids. Even my Buddhist friends have been feeling despair, and when they go bad, you know the end is nigh. Booker T. Washington said, "I shall allow no man to belittle my soul by making me hate him," and this is the most awful thing about it. Yet part of me sort of likes it, too, for the flush of righteousness, the bond to half of the electorate. Who would we be without hate? In politics, breakups, custody disputes, hate turns us into them, with a hangover to boot, the brown-bottle flu of the spirit.
A friend once said that at the end of his drinking, he was deteriorating faster than he could lower his standards, and this began happening to me recently with hate. Some of my wise, more evolved friends say that loathing certain people, henceforth referred to as Them, is not worth the effort, that they are too thin as human forms to actually hate. I say, "Not for me, baby." Others remind us that they are all children of God, loved just as deeply as my grandson.
I say. That is very nice.
Hate, on the one hand, is comforting, but regrettably, on the other, it's malignant. I loathe certain public individuals with great wriggling discomfort, and it steadies me. It's not white-hot hate, as I can't afford to be ignited and let it consume my life, but there is a lot of heat in there, a combination of sickness and fire. The fever makes me into a war zone of blasts, rubble, mission creep, and the ministrations of my own private USO. It steals me from what one might call my better angels, my higher self, my center; c'est la guerre. I have been one of the walking wounded for a year or so — actually more like the zombies in Night of the Living Dead, because we are fused with people when we hate them. We're not us anymore. We become like them. They — Them — are really not doing anything to us. To some extent, I am doing it to myself — the zombification is complete. I'm all parts: the host, the carrier, the new victim.
I can't change them. So I pray. Bless them with nice retirement opportunities, and change me, but while You're at it, help them not to blow up the entire world. Thanks.
Has there ever been more hate loosed upon the world than now? Probably. But there didn't use to be as many automatic weapons, as much advanced military firepower, or such efficiency. Twentieth century technology allowed the camps to be built. So ... not ideal. Nowadays many of us feel that the coldest possible wind if lowing as in a bad snow globe and every day is worlds. As someone said not long ago, it's all Four Horsemen now, all the time.
When I finally got to the point that I couldn't take it anymore, I decided to put down my weapons briefly. Maybe I would end up on the winning side, calmer, or at least less deranges. So as is my habit, I asked God for hep with the mess of me. God immediately sent in two people. The first was Martin Luther King, quoted on Twitter, that hate cannot drive out hate, only love can. That sucks. Yet it was enough for me to realize that I needed palliative care. the second was an eight-year-old boy.
I asked one of my Sunday school kids if he believed God was always with him, helping him. He thought about this for a moment and replied, "Maybe forty percent."
Forty percent! What if I could reduce my viral load by forty percent?
Everything good begins with awareness, whether awakening to the momentousness of the present or to the damage we are causing. In my case, hate is fear and anger at not getting what I want, being afraid of people whose values are so alien to me, and of the unknown. Also, of being blown up. Some of us wake up afraid, and choose our political opposites to be the focus of that fear. We think we have the answers to life's problems — we may need electric cars, windmills, more money, and a few extra atomic weapons. Fear causes fight or flight, but hate alleviates the shame of feeling frozen. Hate is a massive mood-alterer, like a speedball of heroin and cocaine, or at least like auger: swift, stimulating, toxic.
The willingness to look at and maybe change addictive behavior results only from internal pain, severe hangovers, and public disgrace, the sense of being soiled, inside and out, craving a shower with something rough to scour it all off, like an extra-strength loofah. The courage to change the things we can means the stuff inside the snow globe, not where it sits on the mantel. Of course we hate the corporate evildoers and what they are doing to us and to the earth, assuring a future for our grandchildren that is more horrifying than anything we've lived through. Of course we hate the man who raped our friend or abused our child. And I'm going out on a limb here, but almost everyone hates the spokespeople for the NRA.
Awareness helped me make progress in my evolution, like going from finger paints to potato prints. I began to hear people who busted me. One morning recently at the beginning of her sermon, my pastor cited the same Dr. King quotation I'd just come upon, that hate cannot drive out hate, only love can, and I thought, "I heard it the first time." Then at the end of the sermon, wrapping up, she said, sighing, "Just don't let them get you to hate them."
I have not been the same since. She ruined hate for me.
Of course my first response was like Dana Carvey's Church Lady, "Well! Isn't that special," but the pastor's words really got to me. I shared my experience at lunch not long after with someone whose feelings had led to a ten-pound weight gain and a persistent rash: her hate showed. I told her about my project and sucked her into my web; we got into the juiciest discussion about the origins of hate. She said that as a child she'd hated her father for how he treated her mother while he pretended to the world to be such a good guy. And yet she desperately wanted his approval. But he didn't respond to her, and she was left alone with her own shame and self-loathing about wanting to be appreciated by a mean man. It felt like there was domestic violence going on inside her, between the bully and the mother. The conflict left a mucky mess within her, like a cake that wouldn't completely bake, no matter how long you left it in the oven. Without intervention, she turned on herself by feeling ashamed, and she could settle into that, because it was home: bullying, shame, longing.
Of course you would hate any man who made you feel like this. Talking about it that day helped her break out of the cake, like a showgirl.
Everyone with whom I shared my pastor's words experienced something similar. Haters want us to hate them, because hate is incapacitating. When we hate, we can't operate from our real selves, which is our strength. Now that I think of it, this is such a great reason to give up our hate — as revenge, to deprive the haters of what they want.
Some people are able to distance themselves from the people they can't stand by simply not watching the news. Not me. Also, avoiding the news sometimes just suppresses the angry, scared feelings, which can do damage internally, and unconsciously. I had always been more apt to fixate and spew, until recently when hate started kicking my butt.
Something that helps is to look at adversaries as people who are helping you do a kind of emotional weight training. Nautilus for your character. They may have been assigned to you, to annoy or exhaust you. They are actually caseworkers. When my pastor calls the most difficult, annoying people in her life grace-builders, I want to jump out the window. I am so not there yet, but I understand what she's talking about.
Awareness spritzes us awake. Being awake means that we have taken off the blinders. We can choose to see or to squinch our eyes shut like a child, which looks silly on people over eighty pounds. Awareness means showing up, availing oneself of the world, so there is the chance that empathy will step up to bat, even in this lifetime. If we work hard and are lucky, we may come to see everyone as precious, struggling souls.
The willingness to look at and maybe change addictive behavior results only from internal pain, severe hangovers, and public disgrace, the sense of being soiled, inside and out, craving a shower with something rough to scour it all off, like an extra-strength loofah. The courage to change the things we can means the stuff inside the snow globe, not where it sits on the mantel. Of course we hate the corporate evildoers and what they are doing to us and to the earth, assuring a future for our grandchildren that is more horrifying than anything we've lived through. Of course we hate the man who raped our friend or abused our child. And I'm going out on a limb here, but almost everyone hates the spokespeople for the NRA.
Awareness helped me make progress in my evolution, like going from finger paints to potato prints. I began to hear people who busted me. One morning recently at the beginning of her sermon, my pastor cited the same Dr. King quotation I'd just come upon, that hate cannot drive out hate, only love can, and I thought, "I heard it the first time." Then at the end of the sermon, wrapping up, she said, sighing, "Just don't let them get you to hate them."
I have not been the same since. She ruined hate for me.
Of course my first response was like Dana Carvey's Church Lady, "Well! Isn't that special," but the pastor's words really got to me. I shared my experience at lunch not long after with someone whose feelings had led to a ten-pound weight gain and a persistent rash: her hate showed. I told her about my project and sucked her into my web; we got into the juiciest discussion about the origins of hate. She said that as a child she'd hated her father for how he treated her mother while he pretended to the world to be such a good guy. And yet she desperately wanted his approval. But he didn't respond to her, and she was left alone with her own shame and self-loathing about wanting to be appreciated by a mean man. It felt like there was domestic violence going on inside her, between the bully and the mother. The conflict left a mucky mess within her, like a cake that wouldn't completely bake, no matter how long you left it in the oven. Without intervention, she turned on herself by feeling ashamed, and she could settle into that, because it was home: bullying, shame, longing.
Of course you would hate any man who made you feel like this. Talking about it that day helped her break out of the cake, like a showgirl.
Everyone with whom I shared my pastor's words experienced something similar. Haters want us to hate them, because hate is incapacitating. When we hate, we can't operate from our real selves, which is our strength. Now that I think of it, this is such a great reason to give up our hate — as revenge, to deprive the haters of what they want.
Some people are able to distance themselves from the people they can't stand by simply not watching the news. Not me. Also, avoiding the news sometimes just suppresses the angry, scared feelings, which can do damage internally, and unconsciously. I had always been more apt to fixate and spew, until recently when hate started kicking my butt.
Something that helps is to look at adversaries as people who are helping you do a kind of emotional weight training. Nautilus for your character. They may have been assigned to you, to annoy or exhaust you. They are actually caseworkers. When my pastor calls the most difficult, annoying people in her life grace-builders, I want to jump out the window. I am so not there yet, but I understand what she's talking about.
Awareness spritzes us awake. Being awake means that we have taken off the blinders. We can choose to see or to squinch our eyes shut like a child, which looks silly on people over eighty pounds. Awareness means showing up, availing oneself of the world, so there is the chance that empathy will step up to bat, even in this lifetime. If we work hard and are lucky, we may come to see everyone as precious, struggling souls.
— Anne Lamott
From Almost Everything:
Notes On Hope
❤
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