We all need to love each other more. Love conquers hate. Love is love is love is love is love is…
…all really nice to say, but these and other proclamations in the aftermath of the Orlando mass shooting are ultimately tired platitudes that do nothing to curb extremism and violence. They are a relic, hippie ’70s attitude when offered as an answer to stopping mass shootings.
Their implication, of course, is that hatred fuels bloodshed and love is the best weapon to combat it. However, it’s also a notion that naively masks the value of its opposite feeling.
Hate is a powerful, essential emotion. But shame on you for even thinking about expressing it. We live in a PC culture that focuses so intently, so childishly, so relentlessly on the significance of love that hatred has mutated into a taboo feeling. When you hate, you show how weak-willed you are. Strong people rise above. They take the high road. They sit on Oprah’s couch to explain how they’ve forgiven, but not forgotten (another nonsensical cliché). They describe loving their enemies. They talk about love in such a way that if you, too, can’t muster the fortitude to banish hate from your heart, then you will always be a bitter, unhappy person.
What are these people smoking? And why are the rest of us drinking this disgusting Kool-Aid?
I am bitter and unhappy about many things, especially the level of violence that many politicians ignore, if not outright support by refusing to pass commonsense gun laws. You should be bitter and unhappy about this too.
There is love in my heart, but there is also room for hate. Because guess what? It’s OK to hate!
What’s more, when you hate, hate with a passion. I hate the Orlando shooter. I hate people who hurt animals. I hate people who hurt people. I hate Donald Trump. But I am not going to kill any of these individuals—not because I don’t despise them enough, and not because I’d go to jail (well, maybe partly that). It’s because I’m sensible and rational and think there are other ways to fix problems.
We need to hate as much as we need to love, and we need to do so with a purpose. By hating certain people, by hating the way a good number of our politicians behave, by hating the fact that someone can so easily purchase a weapon of war and walk into a bar and snuff out the lives of 49 people, perhaps we may eventually spur real positive change.
On the other hand, skipping down an imaginary street filled with butterflies and unicorns and rainbows, singing phrases of love is not a solution. It’s nothing.
It’s not even nothing. It’s worse because insisting we need to love more and not creating space for purposeful hate is itself part of the problem.
Never mind that all this rhetoric about love doesn’t even make clear whom we are supposed to love. Certainly, I don’t love the Orlando shooter or any terrorists. But I also don’t love the victims. I didn’t know them. I love my mom, I love some other people, and that’s about it. Furthermore, I don’t need you to love me.
What I need is for us all to please stop talking about loving our fellow man as if loving complete strangers makes any sense? Rather than throw out feel-good, fluffy banalities, let’s concentrate on concrete solutions. We are all entitled to our feelings. We are not entitled to our actions. And in the end, to fight gun violence, we are better off focusing on the latter. So like I said last week, call your elected officials and tell them they will only get your vote if they work to enact stricter gun control.
Hate did not cause people to die in Orlando. Easy access to semi-automatic weapons did. This is not complicated.
