A Small World

We use hate to shield ourselves from brokenness, from grief, from heartache, from shame. From the things that are true about this world and about us. And we think that if we can put the problem out there with them, it somehow takes the burden off of us. We don't have to live with it; it's their problem. 

But all hate really does is bring the problem right back to us and put us in a cage of our own making. 

Because when you hate someone or something or some group of persons as a buffer for your own pain, you have to think about them all the time. You have to think about where they might be, when you might encounter them, what you're going to do if you run into one of them, what they must be scheming about right now to destroy your life all over again. Hate won't let you stop thinking about the thing that you hate, and even the smallest little things can remind you of them because, remember, your hate isn't real; it's a lie. And every time you need that lie in your life, every time you come up against a hard or a broken thing, your default mode is to go back to that hate and start thinking about it all over again. 

I know persons who live this way, and I have to say...it seems exhausting. 

Not to mention that if you let hate be the thing that rules your understanding of the world, then you probably plan your life to not ever run into the object of your hate. That person, or that type of person. You have to schedule your whole life around making sure you're not in a place where they can "get" you, where you'll have to face them. 

That makes your world really small. 

Honestly - where can you go if you're afraid of running into someone or some type of person all the time? What kind of bubble can you put yourself in? 

Of course, there are those who use their hate as a justification to try to exclude them from certain spaces, to try to make sure they aren't free to just go wherever they want in the world and do whatever they want. This is how we get oppression. This is how we get one person or one group who attempts to use power to control another person or group - because they don't want their world to have to be smaller to avoid persons they hate based on the lie, so they use the lie to justify their oppression of those persons. 

See, we're not willing to take responsibility for our own hate. We're not willing to say that it's our problem because, quite obviously, it's their problem. They are the problem. They are the ones who do things that make us hate them in the first place, and if they weren't the way that they were, then we wouldn't hate them. So they are the ones who ought to have to be careful about where they go and what they do; not us. Our world shouldn't be the one to get smaller. 

We're not irrational, after all. 

Or are we?

No, of course not.