Hatred Hasn't Won
"Hatred won."
Many times a day I now find myself thinking this; maybe just as some internal primal scream therapy, an emotional pressure-release to fend off a coming explosion, a way of coping with so much hitting the fan in this country at one time.
I say the words to myself, and after a few disorienting seconds the feeling passes. I breathe and realize my overreaction. There is a brief moment of despair but it soon departs, at least one some days.
But on other days, I really believe the words. On those days, the feeling doesn't pass quickly, it lingers and begins to settle like a stone upon my chest. Some days I'm fully convinced that indecency has the run of the house, that good people are an endangered species, that love's victory may not be inevitable, but impossible.
I caught myself believing that today.
Maybe you're feeling that way right now, too. Maybe you're looking at the decidedly sickening stuff that flies in front of your face and you're coming to the conclusion that evil has the upper hand. You may be thinking it's all going to hell in a Cybertruck. You might be losing faith in humanity.
I understand why you'd feel that way.
I also know that you'd be wrong.
Seriously, hatred has not won.
It hasn’t—not everywhere.
Yes, there are some really miserable human beings doing some incredibly cruel things to a whole lot of people; many from Senate seats and mega church pulpits and capitol buildings and television studios. This gives their vitriol a megaphone, it magnifies their enmity, it earns their sickness greater bandwidth than it deserves. The venom those relatively few people produce commandeers the headlines and writes the loud narrative of impending disaster. It's a story you read and re-read all day long. It becomes gospel truth.
But that is not the whole story. It is not your story, or mine, or the story of tens of millions of people like us who are profoundly disturbed right now; those of us sick to our stomachs and moved to tears. We are furious, and that fury is an alarm ringing out in the center of our chests. In that place, hatred has not won. In that place, love and goodness are still in power. In that place, life is defiantly breaking out. In that place, hope is a rising flood.
It is happening in quiet moments with those who make up our tribe, our chosen family;
as we make meals and kiss scraped knees and gather around the table;
in the laughter we cultivate together, the embraces we share, the memories we create;
in the care we provide and the compassion we express and the decency we generate.
It is happening in the silence and solitude when we reflect or think or pray about this world and try to figure out how to help it heal.
It is happening in our relationships and our work and our ministry and our activism.
It is happening right now—in a billion ordinary, sacred acts of love that will never make the news but will still leave their mark.
Right now, we need to stop waiting for permission from someone else to be hopeful. We need to stop requiring consent to be optimistic. We need to believe the goodness we see in the front row of our lives, instead of the lies of those we see from a great distance—or even the ones careening around inside our heads.
Someone once asked Prince about the relatively poor chart performance of one of his albums. His response was something to the effect of, "It's number one in our house." He was reminding the reporter that his life would not be defined by anyone else; that he could only measure for himself what gave him joy or meaning. He could only produce something beautiful to him and rest in that. He could only make the world he had access to.
You are living proof that hatred has not won. In the story you are writing here—good, compassionate, open-hearted people still walk the planet. Don't underestimate the subversive, catalytic power of this.
In the hearts of vengeful people, yes hatred is winning.
In those continually consumed with contempt for others, yes violence has taken the high ground.
In the lives of those who get up every day seeking to do damage, yes the bad people are winning.
But this is not who you are.
And as exhausted and disheartened and terrified as you are—there are millions upon millions who are similarly burdened.
Take a look in the mirror and remember that there, in that heart, hatred has not won.
Notice the people in your news feed who give you reason to keep going. Realize that in them, hatred has not won.
Think about the people you see being brave and selfless and compassionate, and remember that because of them, hatred has not won.
Look across the room or through the contacts on your phone or next to you at dinner, and remember that hatred has not won.
As long as the hearts of decent people are still beating, hope lives.
Put your hand on your chest right now and be reminded:
hatred hasn’t won.
So helpful, John. To complement this, I hope you don't mind my sharing part of what Jess Craven wrote yesterday (Chop Wood, Carry Water):
[My husband and I] had begun to touch on some of the many things our country was about to lose—freedoms, climate progress, tolerance, justice, a functioning public educational system—and somehow, perhaps in an act of emotional self preservation, we’d pivoted to what we would not, however, lose, no matter what.
The number one answer? Love. Partnered with that? Joy.
Fascists can take many things. They can break many more. But there are things they can neither steal nor destroy—unless we let them. And these are, without question, the most important things we possess.
Fascists cannot take our place in our families.
They cannot take our friendships.
They cannot take our empathy.
They can not take our ability to experience beauty, nor to create it. They can’t take away our sense of wonder. They can’t rob us of compassion. They can’t take laughter—in fact they can’t get anywhere close to it; humor, to fascists, is like garlic to vampires.
Fascists can’t take away community, although they surely will try. They can’t take our pleasure in gardening, or drinking good tea, or listening to music, or making great art, or visiting the dog park, or walking with a friend.
They can’t take most of what makes life worth living. They can’t, in fact, get anywhere near the “human essentials,” for the place those essentials come from is a place where fascism starves.
So while we still grieve, and are only just coming out of shock, and are being forced back into a resistance stance we thought we’d long moved beyond, we must not forgo opportunities to find joy. To achieve connection. To feel love. We must, instead, chase them, nurture them, grow them, increase them.
For it is in the spaces fascists can’t enter that we can begin to build the structure of something entirely new, something stronger and more fascist-proof.
Something made of love.
Will we succeed?
Only if we try. Nothing is guaranteed, but it is in the trying that we’ll keep our humanity, grow our hope, and find new strengths.
I'm in the exact place. Grief isn't linear. My emotions are rollicking every day. But at the end, I come back to how proud I am of myself, of you, of so many others on this side of history. The right thing doesn't always win, but that doesn't mean it wasn't right. To use Prince, in our house we did what was right, what historians will deem to have been right, and we have a right to define our own value.