Love Beats Hate — and It’s A...
This is my husband’s birthday and an especially appropriate day to write about Love.
I consider myself to be a spiritual person although I’m not a member of any established religion. It’s sad that in these times that statement alone might be cause for a “religious” person to think less of me.
We are living in extremely difficult and sad times. My feeling is that most of the hate and divisiveness in the world today is really about something else entirely — FEAR. Also some stems from people desperate to protect their material wealth.
We fear what we don’t know or understand. We hear stories and rumors about bad things done by people of ethnic, racial or religious groups other than our own, and sadly sometimes the stories are facts. But if we stop and think things through, how many “bad” people do we actually know, or even ever encounter? How many kind and loving people do we know? I would guess we all know many more of the latter than of the former.
Who said, “Love thy neighbor”? Who said, “Love thine enemies”? Who tried to teach others to be tolerant, understanding and forgiving? Everyone knows there are people of every color, ethnic and religious persuasion who do bad things.
Perhaps the next time we each meet or encounter someone different from ourselves, we could just stop and think about who that person really is; look past any obvious physical, sexual or religious differences and into his or her eyes and then further into his or her soul; see them as another human being with the same feelings, strengths, weaknesses, fears and capacity for love that we each have.
My biggest fear is that if we don’t all start learning to do this, humanity — the group of which we are all members — has no hope of survival.
I choose Peace and Love over fear and hate — anytime.
