The Don't List:
"Do not fight hate with hate."
Do not confuse hate with anger, with the indignant cry of the victims or the protective fury of those who love them. Some anger is the anger of love, and this anger is an essential tool in the struggle against hate.
"Do not fight hate with hate."
Do not create false equivalences between the hate in the heart of anti-Semites and the reactive hate of those who have been brutalized by anti-Semitism. The call not to fight hate with hate is a reminder of how best to fight the evil of those who swim in the waters of hate. It isn't a tool to re-victimize those who have been splashed by these waters.
"Do not fight hate with hate."
Do not confuse the act of hating people with the act of hating injustice, hating evil, hating hate. While hating people is a poor weapon to fight hatred of people, hatred of hate is essential. We fight hate because we hate hate. We grope for ways to love the human filled with hate because we hate the hate that has consumed then and twisted their humanity.
"Do not fight hate with hate."
Do not let this mantra block empathy for the victims of hate. Do not speak it from a place of privilege, where you sit untouched by hate and tell its victims to be saintly while you wag your finger at them. Do not use this mantra as a test to judge which victims of hate are worthy of your compassion.
Do not fight hate with hate.
The Do List:
Fight hate by loving its victims, all its victims, including those who have been eaten up by it from the inside, including those who have chosen to live in hate as a way to find meaning, including those who have been murdered or orphaned or brutalized by those it has possessed, including yourself.
Fight hate by groping for the words and actions that will lift up the humanity of the person before you.
Fight hate by recognizing its seeds in your own heart: the disdain, the condescension, the dismissal of others based on where they're from or what they look like or what they believe or how they respond to the struggles of life. Forgive yourself for those seeds. Forgive others for those seeds.
Fight hate with the angry love that will not stand idly by while there is preventable suffering.
Fight hate with the mercy that can crack walls of defensive intolerance--mercy for the trembling child huddled beneath the layers of ugliness.
Fight hate with the grace that prevents minor failures from blossoming into larger ones.
Fight hate by screaming "No" to the darkness, and then by shedding what light you can.
Removing the quotes at the last iteration of the saying, in the first half of this reflection, is deliberate: I am no longer just considering the saying but affirming it. But I am affirming it with false understandings set aside. The "do list" offers a positive understanding, probably incomplete.
ReplyDeleteAre there misunderstandings or ways of mangling or misusing the saying that I have missed? Are there elements of what it really means, the positive stance that it is pointing towards in negative language, that I have left out?