I found myself playing with words yesterday after reading about OBL’s death and its aftermath. What started as a wordplay, ended as a meditation on life and hate.
First, the word play…
I hate hate.
I hate hatred.
I hate the hate that hate begets.
Sometimes I mess around with words, doodling, looking for combinations that sound nice or rhyme or are intriguing, like in the above example when one word can be both a verb and a noun. In spite of the ugliness of the word hate, I like the last line’s lilt (I like this sentence’s, too!)
…then the meditation.
Though I’ll probably never write an essay entitled “When Justice Deserves Death,” I realize there are times when someone does something so bad, he or she deserves to die. This certainly seems to be one of those moments.
Hate doesn’t win just because hateful people do very bad things. Hate wins when we hate in return. Hate wins when we celebrate even a just death. Revenge debilitates whoever craves and nurtures it.
Hate loses to love. Defeat hate by mourning any need to kill, by mourning the natural but destructive urge to be glad for a death. Defeat hate by loving, by giving.
I worry about an excessive hatred that can become such an obsession, the hater forgets to love, to build, to hope. A true and effective defense against evil and hate is to support and build what it tries to destroy: people and the institutions that enrich us. As people support and love other people, family, friends, and even strangers in need, hate is defeated. As people build up, giving money and time and backing supportive policies, the institutions that build and strengthen our common life: schools, the arts, research and innovation, commerce and trade, hate is defeated. More than any just death or other armed response, these are what will help defeat what destroys.
