A few days ago I went into my Facebook settings and ‘followed’ everyone on my friends list. (Over time I had ‘unfollowed’ several friends, for a variety of reasons, and recently recognized how limiting that could potentially be for those friendships.)

I consider myself fairly open-minded at this point in life – though, actually, I ‘always’ did… and… I just wasn’t, for a very long time. I grew up with hate, primarily racism, sexism, and homophobia, with plenty of extra hate laying about for ‘strangers’ and ideas that didn’t suit my community – or my father. He was a fairly well-educated man, professional, with broad life experience and a good intellect. He also thought of himself as ‘open-minded’. He also was not. Definitions of terms are surprisingly stretchy, varying rather a lot between how we apply a word to others, versus how we apply it to ourselves. Why do I mention it? The quantity of peculiarly subtle hate that cropped up in my Facebook feed when I followed everyone on my friends list. I admit I was taken by surprise by the rationalized lack of tolerance, lack of compassion, lack of understanding, and the intensely dogmatic (and more than a little nationalistic) ‘us versus them’ perspective on the world. Fear-based thinking. Entitlement. Ad hominem and straw-man fallacies in abundance. It was an eye-opening and thought-provoking experience. It got me thinking about hate… and the woman in the mirror.

I don’t hate much. I mean that in the verb form, as in “I don’t indulge in the experience of feeling hate, or acting on impulses that may have their source in the experience of hating” when I recognize and can avoid it. I qualify it in that fashion (‘…when I recognize and can avoid it.’) because I’m human. Prone to irrational fears of the unknown, prone to seeing threats where no threat exists, and prone to negative biases – because at one time in the evolution of humanity, we needed those characteristics to secure our safety. Not very useful at this point, I must say, and obviously damnably difficult to let go of, based on what I see in my Facebook feed this past couple days. I’m not immune. I tend toward reactivity, versus responsiveness (as do many of us, it’s very human). I practice another way, deliberately, willfully, and with use of plenty of verbs – because I don’t find positive value in hate. Full stop. No need to justify my values there. This is who I am.

Now.

Yep. There’s the thing; it’s who I am now. I’ve grown and changed a lot over the years. There was a time when I wore hate like a luxurious cloak of finely made fabric; I brandished it, justified it, and felt righteous about my hate. I didn’t call it hate. I didn’t recognize the hateful nature of my words and ideology. I didn’t understand that I was hateful. I didn’t see that I was hurting people. I had little self-awareness and less compassion. I look back on that much younger self of long ago and I am embarrassed – and relieved to be transformed over time, through experience, through choices, and through the patience and acts of loving friends and associates who valued me beyond the hate, the prejudice, and the ignorance.

Thank you. (You know who you are.)

Hate is pretty ugly stuff. A lot of it sources with our fears, and our insecurity about our selves. Worse still, a lot of our fears and our hate, culturally, is manufactured bullshit – created to fatten up someone’s bottom line, either at the polls, or in the marketplace. That’s some sick shit right there, when a human being is willing to foment hate to profit from it personally. I’m not okay with that. I’m okay with being uncomfortable with what I don’t understand. I’m okay with being uneasy about what is strange or new or different. I’m okay with wanting or needing to set boundaries for myself, or having limitations as a human being – I’m a human being. Hate though? Not actually okay at all – not if I intend to say I am a civilized, rational, reasonable, good-hearted, compassionate, human being. The ‘us/them’ bullshit used to justify hate is precisely that – it’s bullshit. We are all human beings – even the fairly hateful loathsome ones who push my ability to tolerate human stupidity – and we are each having our own experience. I can’t actually ‘fix this’, though… except with regard to the woman in the mirror. I don’t do hate. It’s a choice. There are verbs involved.

…I have friends (and family) who do. Hate exists because people hate. That’s an unpleasant thing to have to accept… that there are people who matter to me who embrace hate. These are good-hearted people, generally, who likely don’t see themselves in that light, and who don’t recognize their words or behavior as hateful. They feel justified. They are also having their own experience. I am uncomfortable with hate. I find myself facing an interesting life lesson here. I am thankful that friends and loved ones who knew a more hateful younger me didn’t turn away from me; over time it changed me to see another way modeled by people I value.

There’s no denouement here, no handy lesson, no easy solution or catchy final paragraph wherein the good guys win. This is life. This is messy. This is challenging. Change and growth don’t come easily – and can’t be forced. I can continue, myself, to grow, to do better than I did a year ago, and to practice good practices, learning to treat myself – and the world – truly well. I can refuse, myself, to hate. I hope it’s enough.