Hate Is A Complete And Total Surrender Of Personal Power

…to people who can’t or won’t change anyway.

There was a time in my much younger life when I hated one or more persons. I think at one point, it was a sort of searing, visceral hate. There were things that I dreamed about doing to the other person, but could never bring myself to do him or her. I couldn’t do those things because I kept thinking through what would happen to me.

I’d be embarrassed. I’d feel bad for the other person. I’d go to jail. I’d be ostracised by everyone who knew me. I’d regret it for the rest of my life.

Yet, those things that I thought of, that I fantasized about, they were obsessions. They took up space in my brain, time in my day and life away from me. Hate made me tired, so tired. And my hate required other people to change. But at that time in my life, I was not willing to change. My unwillingness to change made me tired. I ran in circles in my brain, trying to enjoy the hate and make the other person change more to my liking at the same time.

All along the way, people I knew and who knew me could see that I was suffering and they kept telling me the same things:

“You can’t change people.”

“Those people are never going to change.”

“You are filled with resentment. Resentment is like drinking poison, waiting for the other person to die.”

But no one ever told me that hate is a surrender of personal power to someone else. I had to figure that one out for myself. I had known this intuitively for a long, long time, yet had never articulated it. Now I see that I live in a culture that is filled with hate, with mass shootings being a major symptom of that hate, and I know what hate means to me now.

When I look at racism, I see people who hate other people for the color of their skin. That skin color is never, ever, going to change. There is no therapy, no cure, no magic available to change the color of the skin. Yet, day after day, I see headlines for mass shootings, hate crimes, threats, and protests against people of color. For the racists, I have to wonder, why hate people with brown skin when you know that the color of their skin is never going to change?

Then there are the Trump haters. I understand their pain, their sense of urgency, and their motivation. But Trump is never going to change. His job is not to make…