011- Hate

You could say I hate a lot of things, but I think most people do. I hate peas and cheese. I hate homework. I hate spiders. I hate waking up early for school. I hate being sick. But I figure most people hate things like that. You typically don't hear someone declare that they love homework or being sick. But those are trivial, common types of hatred. There are deeper kinds.

Like how the colonists hated British rule, though, I bet you didn't read this for a history lesson. People tell me that it wasn't hate that led to the Revolution. I don't think it was a spontaneous decision or a slight disagreement that led to the war. If someone's going to start a bloodbath, I'd guess that, well, maybe I would hope that there's something more than boredom fueling it. So, if you're telling me hate is bad... Does that mean you disagree with the Revolutionary War? Should we still be under the British flag because it's simply not okay to hate? I refuse to believe that the Bostonians had their tea party out of fun and I refuse to believe that Jefferson wrote the Declaration out of boredom. And I would like to think that Washington had something better to do on Christmas than cross the Delaware if this was all created from fleeting, purposeless thoughts.

Why do we search for cures and panaceas if we love our diseases? Why do we get vaccinations? To avoid death or disfigurement? Why do we do that? It's not out of love.

Where did the cures come from? Because there had to have been someone somewhere who hated the disease enough to start the journey to find the cure. And they hated it so much that they did find it. They did change fate for someone's life and they altered the world. And some of us call them heroes... But they hated.

In a world without dark, would we know what light is? Would it not just be, because there isn't one or the other, and nothing to compare the two, because there's just the one, and that's all we've ever known. So there would be no words to define them. No word to name them. Would you know what hot is if there was no cold? It would be consistency.

A speaker at Winterfest told me that he converted an entire faculty of a hotel to Christianity in the course of one night. One of his arguments was that if there was no bad in the world, we could never know what the good was. And so, hate is in this world, the same as bad, the same as cold, the same as dark. And without hate, we would never know love, because there would be no spectrum, just the one, just the consistency. There would be no intimacy, no affection. It would be the colorless world that you hear about in books like The Giver.

I'm not saying it's perfectly fine to hate, because I know that hate can be a dangerous animal. It can cause people to shoot to kill, to tear down their enemies ruthlessly- that's not the kind of hate that I speak of. That's the kind that should be condemned, not the kind that yearns for reform- to cure the disease, to forge a country away from corrupted sovereigns, something that can help measure love in someone's life. Just as with anything else you could possibly find in the world, too much of hate is never good. But I never understood why people said not to hate, because hate can be the thing that saves lives. It can be the thing that stops corruption. It can be the thing that cures cancer.