If I asked you to list five red items as quickly as possible,
You would probably say roses,
Tomatoes,
Fire trucks,
Stop signs,
And maybe Rudolph's nose.
That's because we compulsively file everything we see and experience into groups,
Categories,
And types.
Ever since infancy,
This advanced filing system makes the world less overwhelming for us to process.
We notice something,
We cross-reference it with everything that is already familiar to us,
And we quickly label it as either harmless or dangerous,
Cute or scary,
And so on.
But where do those labels come from?
One problem is that we label everything unconsciously and automatically as individuals,
And another problem is that we do it collectively as a society.
We use pre-assigned labels for whatever we don't understand by looking at society's pre-existing categories as a guide.
These values may have been set by our parents,
Our close circle of friends,
Or worse yet,
The internet.
Many of our thoughts,
Opinions,
And beliefs are founded on information we subconsciously receive from sources as unreliable as the grapevine.
I recently heard someone say,
The people with the most money have the biggest megaphone,
But it doesn't mean they have the most interesting or accurate things to say.
We witness this whenever a celebrity recommends a product that becomes an overnight success.
There's nothing inherently wrong with influencers like that,
But there's a difference between leaders who tell you what to think and those who invite you to think for yourself.
We somehow simultaneously insist on referring to ourselves as independent thinkers,
Yet we love it when others do the thinking for us.
As Bjork sang,
There is no logic to human behavior.
When we were teenagers,
Many of us became attached to popular beliefs in order to appear,
Well,
Popular.
But as adults,
I think it's our inherent responsibility to question those beliefs.
If we never step outside of our small circle of friends and family,
We end up living in a bubble,
Agreeing with everyone who agrees with us and unfriending or disowning anyone who does not.
Labeling and categorizing may sound harmless,
Effective,
And even necessary,
Which it can certainly be at times,
But not if we don't know the source of our information.
Investigating the origin of external stimuli,
Like the news,
Is something I think we do a little more these days.
But it's equally imperative to also question what's behind the source of our existing opinions,
Because it could very well be the ego.
That's why I often remind myself not to believe everything I think.
The ego can be dangerous because it is selfish enough to justify hatred and violence as virtues.
Driven by its lust for power,
The ego considers the harm it causes as somehow superior to the harm caused by others,
Without pausing to realize that causing harm only leads to more harm.
This was glaringly obvious to me during a recent conversation with a so-called peace activist,
We'll call him Rob,
Who was far from peaceful and bordering on hostile.
He insisted there is a difference between a neo-Nazi who wants him dead because he is black or gay,
For example,
And him wanting to kill the neo-Nazi.
The reality is that even terrorists believe they are fundamentally good.
It's our behavior that inevitably reflects the hate within each of us,
Often disguised as passion,
Faulty logic,
Or a helpful coping mechanism.
We hate bigots,
Racists,
And fundamentalists,
But why?
Because they hate us?
How does that make sense?
This was one of the most challenging perspectives to hold when I was growing up in Israel.
The Israeli kids were practically raised to hate Palestinians while Palestinians were raised to hate Israelis.
We hated them because they hated us and they followed the same dangerous rationale.
When I moved to the United States and befriended my first Palestinian,
We both laughed at the absurdity of it all,
Even though it wasn't funny,
And still isn't.
I think segregation is to blame.
As Ani DiFranco said,
I was five years old when they showed me a picture of three oranges and a pear.
They asked me,
Which one is different and does not belong?
They taught me that different is wrong.
That's exactly what segregation does.
So I asked Rob if he had unconsciously contributed to our segregated world in his own way,
And although he didn't like admitting it,
He said that having a special channel on TV for black people,
BET,
Probably isn't a good idea,
Or that it was perhaps necessary at a time but is outdated today.
He also said that going to gay clubs may have made sense a few years ago as a safe space for him to go,
But all the clubs nowadays further segregate the community into more sub-communities,
Often pitted against one another.
He laughed and said that instead of simply categorizing movies as comedy,
Drama,
Or suspense,
For example,
Netflix now has an LGBTQIA category.
For whose benefit does that segregation exist?
There's a difference between categorizing apple varieties in the grocery store and the aforementioned categorization on Netflix.
One is rooted in hatred and segregation,
And I'm not talking about the green apples versus the red.
Here is my question for you.
Is there a difference between the hatred the neo-nazi has toward Rob and the hatred that Rob has toward the neo-nazi?
In both cases,
The hatred stems from fear of the unknown,
Panic that one person's way of life oppresses the others,
And a deep-rooted need to defend and protect the values that each holds at any cost.
Even if one becomes the very instrument of death and misery to defend those values,
He still feels he is in the right.
And why is that?
Because in our compulsive need to label everything as either wrong or right,
What do you think we'll label ourselves?
Right,
Of course,
Every time.
To better understand hatred,
We must first be honest about where it resides in each of us.
It sometimes dresses up as bigotry,
Discrimination,
Prejudice,
Self-righteousness,
Preference,
Favoritism,
Bias,
Convenience,
Or partiality.
But it's there.
Once we see it in ourselves,
We can recognize it all around us,
And then we can stop feeding the hate-filled segregation that we've been condoning in our lives without even realizing it.
Like when we mindlessly support businesses and politics that benefit from systemically keeping us separated instead of unified.
As Martin Luther King Jr.
Brilliantly summarized,
Darkness cannot drive out darkness.
Only light can do that.
And hate cannot drive out hate.
Only love can do that.
The Buddha said,
How easy it is to see your brother's faults.
How hard it is to face your own.
You mock his,
But yours you hide.
Dwelling on your brother's faults multiplies your own.
