“If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.”
1 John 4:20
Hate.
It is the tendrils of society, the construct of discrimination, and it is in every breath we breathe. Its dominion is pervasive and persisting; nowhere does it not fester, and nowhere is it not accepted, integrated, and celebrated.
Despite its inherent nature, hate, for many, means mobility—leverage. A degrading comment incites laughter, false superiority brings power, and fulfillment comes with supremacy—an upper hand of ostracism and high-caliber hostility. It mocks the hopeful and degrades the weary, but it is spoken with a freelance ignorance and leaves an aftertaste of distortion.
Online potentates dictate what is right and what is wrong, and political magnates who pretend they operate on righteous words live by blatant blasphemy. Their love does not transcend borders; it halts at the sight of the sinners that they believe they are so different from. It is puzzled by the foreign world, constrained to a meaningless normalcy. It whispers to worshippers of false idols, slewing deception. It tricks people into believing that their judgment makes them invincible to consequences.
In all reality, hate is the bereaver of empathy—the idea that one cannot love another if they do not agree.
This is a taught value for many. Young men find identity in a faux-masculinity of sorts; for them, there is little more to being a man than dominance. Teenage girls are the ridicule of appearance towards one another, now more than ever; something is always “ugly.” Parents pass down convolutions that they dub as jokes. The cycle persists.
Reasoning for such degradation is oftentimes absent; it is a “just because,” because that is the single, sole answer when a lack of compassion is disguised as mere human nature.
Man hates woman. Woman hates man.
Red hates Blue. Blue hates Red.
Native hates foreign. Foreign hates native.
Friend hates enemy. Enemy hates friend.
“Just because.”
Love mourns what this hate ruins. One cannot claim to know love if they resent the very flesh and blood they coexist alongside. This contorts affection, so now be it selective, rather than enduring. It picks and chooses who is worthy and is exclusive to accord. It knows only limits, boundaries, and partitions. In the deepest extremities of its aversion lies an unbreakable rhythm, etched before us by the generations before us and their unwavering vows of predisposed enmity. Our correspondents become malignancies, our counterparts become competition, and we become our own adversaries, a contradiction of autonomy and mercy.
If it serves any solace, there is oftentimes a reason why regret cannot become the prey of subjugation; we often tend to look back and wish we’d changed things instead of confirming the same fated succession of chauvinism.
For there is no human that has natural perfection, no person on this Earth who is complete in themselves, and no one who is not at least a little bit conscious of their faults. And there is no mortal wound that cannot be healed with humility, forgiveness, and the benevolence of the gentle and tenderhearted.
Let the world envelop itself in magnanimity, as it has always been intended to do so.
