Hatred

Hola Everybody,
I’m struggling, but I’m still up. Some of this springs from reflections of my recent work with the Alliance of Families for Justice. Check them out. Get involved. Don't react -- respond!

Anger and Hatred

Police attack peaceful water protectors with powerful water canons in freezing temperatures. Photo: Avery Leigh White

Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd
 -- Bertrand Russell

Hatred has never conquered hatred. Hatred merely leads to revenge, and revenge leads to more hate. Hence, a cycle of suffering is set in motion that can go on and on. We only need to look at the world around us to see the sad evidence of this truth.

Hatred is an extreme form of anger. The teachings of the path I follow take anger very seriously because anger causes so much suffering. I see hate as being rooted in fear. Fear is a powerful core emotion.

Even when anger is not acted out and seems controlled, a person who is inwardly angry can instantly change the atmosphere of a room she enters. There is an invisible, but palpable chill and anyone nearby becomes more guarded and less spontaneous. This happens without conscious effort. It seems to be a response at a very deep (cellular?) level to the quality of energy that anger gives out.

You see this happen often in personal relationships, but the wreckage of collective hate is everywhere to be seen in our world. There is, for example, the ascension of a racist billionaire to the highest office in the known universe. Put there by millions who protect their anger onto blacks and Latinx. 

When anger is acted out and results in violence, the damage is obvious. Some years ago, I read the words by the Cambodian monk, Maha Ghosananda, who observed “When this defilement of anger really gets strong, it has no sense of good or evil, right or wrong, of husbands, wives, children. It can even drink human blood.” This was a tragic comment upon a bloody civil war that had torn Cambodia apart and killed almost everyone he knew. It is also, in my view, what fuels the long-standing and shameful US practice of racialized social control which has resulted in the devastation and enslavement of millions of people -- the vast majority Black and Latinx.

On the contrary, what is often not understood about hatred is the harm it does to those who cultivate it. The first person hurt is always the one who is full of hate. An mind full of hate is a suffering mind. An angry mind is agitated and tight, constricted and narrow in its thinking. Judgment and perspective vanish. All good sense disappears. One feels restless and driven. Nothing is satisfying, everything is tension. And this is what happens at the collective level. The vast majority of white people in the US, for example, are so angry, that they are easily manipulated into projecting their anger on the most vulnerable of the population.

What happens during anger is that the sense of self becomes very large, and so does the sense of “the other.” A major reason anger is so very painful is that it instantly creates a sharp distinction between self and other. An imaginary line is drawn that cannot be passed. For example, if I make the statement, “Any friend of those assholes, is not a friend of mine,” I am drawing a line (more on that later).

There is also an intoxicating effect to anger. There is a strong feeling of self-righteousness. Thoughts rooted in justification take over: “She abused me! Look at what she did to me!” This is combined with feelings of defiance and rectitude: “I am right!” However, underlying the intoxication of anger is the pain of a mind so narrowly constricted that it closes itself off from human connection. This also plays out on the national stage.

Whites, many of whom have been shut off economically, turn their anger on the false perception of hordes of undisciplined, immoral, unintelligent Blacks and Latinx who have destroyed “America” -- the same America that needs to be “great again.” In the 1990s, it was the specter of black and Latinx “super-predators” who had no conscience and needed to be “brought to heel” like animals.

The results of such hatred can be devastating. Hatred is like a poison in the mind. It generates an unhealthy cycle of cause and effect. Every thought, word, or act, or social policy has an angry after-effect. Like throwing a pebble into a pond, an act or thought rooted in hatred sets into motion a series of ripple effects that go out in every direction. Caught in the grips of hatred, we can come to feel that we are stuck with what we have done, and with the effects that we have caused.

I believe that the majority of harmful patterns of behavior are rooted in unconscious anger/ hatred. People will gossip about others, spread false accusations about others as a way of maintaining this angry state of mind. Existing in an environment of fear (lack of faith), hate, and anger, they lash out at others and create policies in order to maintain their inflated egos.

I guess the answer is not to respond in anger, but to generate love instead. However, one can choose to love from afar. One can choose to minimize contact with harmful and negative influences. Yes we can disagree and still love each other. However, if your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and the denial of my humanity and right to exist, then I can’t do the kumbaya thingee. Still, my response must be rooted in compassion (of self and other) otherwise I will have become the face of hatred. Cornel West reminds us that we should, “Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public.”

And so it is with my own decisions about the difference I want to make in this life. I think what makes decisions skillful or not has a lot to do with intent. If one has an angry or hateful intent, then, like the ripples in the pond, we all suffer the consequences. However, if the intent is based on compassion and an attempt to create, or be a part of, a social justice movement, then we can live knowing that we’re walking our path to the best of our ability.

For me the answer isn’t so much on closing down jails or prisons, or even undoing mass incarceration. I see mass incarceration and racialized social control as symptoms of a deeper problem. Rather, I see the work of envisioning and creating a world where there is no place for dehumanization, the real work. Everything else is still dehumanization.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization… 

If you would like to support this blog and my writing, you can do so by clicking HERE. You can also give via PayPal HERE.

 

Redemption Song

Hola mi Gente,
I usually post this around this time of year… it’s a Thanksgiving tradition of sorts on this blog. Sometimes, when I think this too self-indulgent, or passé (I am a walking cliché, it seems), someone will send me a message usually beginning like so: “I read your blog and I never comment… ” (LOL!) And it never fails, someone will tell me that reading the following helped them, or they shared it with someone they thought it could help. So… here goes.

Redemption Song

My life is my message

The cliché that life is stranger than fiction is true enough. And believe me: my life has been pretty much “strange.” Thanksgiving Day has its own personal meaning for me, as I am certain it does for everyone. Actually, Thanksgiving Day has layers of meaning.

First, there is the glossing over the very real consequences of colonialism, the mythical version of Thanksgiving creates a fairy tale out of land theft, betrayal, brutality, and genocide, functioning to erase the very real and traumatic experiences of entire indigenous nations. This whitewashing and outright erasure of indigenous history is not only inhumane and oppressive to indigenous people, it is also unfair to all U.S. citizens who stand to learn from a rich and equally tragic history.

On another level, people of Puerto Rican descent have traditionally taken US holidays and used them as opportunities to express our own cultural identity. For example, Puerto Ricans will eschew the traditional holiday fare of turkey and potatoes and substitute lechon and pasteles, Puerto Rican culinary staples. If we do cook turkey, we cook it pavo-chon-style -- a turkey prepared in a manner that makes it taste like lechon (pork suckling). Also, the holidays are always a chance to celebrate our music, our unique forms of dancing, and kinship ties. Therefore, Puerto Ricans subvert the mythical (actually genocidal) Thanksgiving and give it their own meaning. And as humans, that’s what we do best, we create meaning.

Thanksgiving Day is also now primarily identified as a secular all-inclusive day of expressing appreciation for life and having gratitude for the things we need to live a happy and healthy life. As a Latino, the cultural values of extended family ties and Thanksgiving evoke childhood memories of large (and often hilariously insane) family get-togethers.

However, for me Thanksgiving holds its most significant meaning on a very personal level. You see, it was on this day twenty-six years ago that I experienced the first of a series of “spiritual awakenings” that would drastically change my life. The exact date is November 26, 1990 and it often happens that it falls on or near Thanksgiving Day. A couple of weeks before that fateful day, on a cold, drizzly November day, I was so overcome with despair that I considered and attempted suicide. It is actually a little funny: As I climbed over the rail on the Brooklyn Bridge’s pedestrian walk (it’s not easy to jump off that damned bridge!), I was so skinny from malnutrition and years of substance abuse that a strong Nor’easter wind knocked me back on my ass to the pedestrian walkway. I saw this as the ultimate failure which gives you an idea of my state of mind at the time.

I walked away from that only to opt for a more torturous suicide: the daily act of chasing that White Lady, Heroin. Ensnared by my warped thinking, I had this fear that I would botch up my own suicide and merely succeed in paralyzing myself, condemning myself to chase drugs from the disadvantage of a wheelchair. In fact, I remember another addict who was in a wheelchair. I decided I would make someone else put myself out of my misery.

And though I speak lightly today of that time, I was so miserable. I do not believe in a God in the traditional Christian/ Judeo sense -- an anthropomorphic omnipotent super being. Yet back then I would pray each night that some Higher Power would find it in its mercy to take my life me my sleep. Still, every day I awoke to my pain and despair. I would always wake up sick and broke, but somehow manage to spend $300 by the end of the day, feeding a merciless heroin habit.

If you are wondering, I fed my drug habit by ripping off drug-dealers, never a safe proposition. One day a victim of one of my swindles threatened me with a gun. I grabbed the gun by the barrel, put it to my forehead, and begged him to shoot. All I asked was that he made sure to kill me because, “You would be doing me a favor, motherfucker.” This occurred in broad daylight in the middle of a crowded New York City street. I remember a crowd forming and people screaming; but what I remember most was thinking that this was my way out. “Do it,” I yelled. He pulled the trigger and… 

Nothing happened.

I don’t know if the gun jammed or if it wasn’t loaded, whatever the reason, the gun failed to discharge. My would-be “assistant suicider” freaked out, yanked the gun from my hands, and walked away. I called after him, letting him know he could get another chance. That’s how much I wanted to die. And, I thought, I could do nothing right.

That wasn’t the worst of it, my life continued to bottom out until November 26th, 1990 when I experienced an incident so traumatic it would change me and my world in an inexplicable way. Actually, most people would consider the events that transpired on that cold, dreary November day as a defeat. Very simply, after being released from New York City’s infamous jail, Rikers Island, for exactly fourteen days, I was re-arrested. It was also that last day of my active addiction -- the last day I took a drug.

I didn’t know it then but it was the beginning of a new life: a life that today is far from perfect, that has suffering, illness, death, and many challenges, but also contains an invincible of joy at its core. This is part of the reason I do the work that I do. I know even the worst of us have the potential to liberate ourselves from socially constructed or self-made prisons. And let me be clear: we’re all “doing time” in some way, we all wear shackles. To a degree, we all enact patterns of behavior or carry the proverbial baggage.

No, I am not a religious person. My personal view is that religion is for people who are afraid of hell and spirituality is for those who have already been there. I simply try to be the best person I can be on a daily basis and oftentimes I fall short of the mark. However, my intentions are usually good and my direction somewhat orderly. I try to live a life centered on compassion for others, personal growth, self-actualization, and passion for social change.

On that day, twenty-six ago, I had no way of knowing of the possibility of life as it has manifested itself for me today. The past year has been one of the most challenging for me in a long time. A lot of that has to do with being unemployed. Today, I will most likely lose all my property in storage, my cell has been cut off, and I’m living in… well, you get the idea. Yet, I am for the most part happy today. It’s a happiness independent of any person, place, or thing. On the surface I can be sad, happy, angry, disappointed, disgusted -- I can be experiencing any number of attachments -- but at the center, at the very core of me, there is an invincible joy greater than any drug-induced high I have ever experienced. And believe me, coming from me, that’s saying a lot.

On that day, sitting there in the midst of total failure and utter humiliation, I came undone. And that was a good thing, because in experiencing complete obliteration I became open to something more than my small self. In emptying myself, I came to see that what I perceived as the void was in reality my innate and boundless potential as a human being.

I am genuinely grateful. As I said before, this past year, as with all years, has been a challenging. I have experienced sadness, frustration, happiness, love, rejection (the full catastrophe!). I could easily surmise, if I were so disposed, that my life, that life itself, sucks. But that’s a coward’s lie. Life is a gift -- probably the most precious of gifts. My life today is like a redemption song -- a song of freedom. And at the very least there is nothing worse (or better) than that fateful day twenty-five years ago. Today I woke up and I am… here… and for that I am most grateful.

May you all have as much to be thankful for.

My name is Eddie and I am in recovery from civilization… 

If you would like to donate to this blog and my writing, you can do so by clicking HERE. You can also give via PayPal HERE.