Free Ireland from hate, etc.

Every St. Patrick’s Day, being part Irish, I think fondly of the NoDAPL protest in which I was told I couldn’t understand the dynamic because I didn’t come from a conquered people.

Enter exhibit A, an ode to Ireland found etched into an old sidewalk in downtown Bismarck.

Image © Julie R. Neidlinger. All rights reserved.

There are a lot of places that could stand being freed from hate.

Plato said that hate was tied to the soul’s lower appetites, a case of anger and desire gone wild in which reason is distorted and emotions take control of you. “Follow your heart” has always been terrible advice, but never more so than if your heart is full of anger.

Aristotle had a different angle. Hate wasn’t just some personal resentment that you harbored, but was instead the broader disgust and dislike of a people group. Only patience and justice could keep hate under control.

Nietzsche, that god-killer who, now that he is dead knows otherwise, saw hate as the byproduct of resentment. The weak were especially prone to it because they envied the strong, and feeling powerless is the thing that drives hate. Embracing your own power instead of simmering in a pot of victimhood was his solution.

Sartre, the grand existentialist, saw hate as a choice we make in which we choose to define ourselves against others. Getting rid of hate only comes when we stop setting up a world of “others” to blame for all of our troubles.

Hannah Arendt tied hate to social roots, asserting that it grew best in fear and isolation. Totalitarian regimes that foster “us vs. them” tapped into this quite well, and the only way to combat it is to build meaningful connection and try to understand each other.

Philosophy is wonderful for what it is. We try to figure out why and how, the machinery that drives.

The Bible, however, has an interesting approach to hate. It dwells less on pondering the source of it and instead, focuses more on getting rid of it, as if the human default setting is a dark heart in which the seed of hate already is, only waiting to be watered. The pride, envy, fear, and anger that the philosophers over the ages have rightly identified as part of the issue are the mere fruit of the plant, not the root.

God is love.

Not the sweaty-rainbow glitter-and-glue thing we try to justify as love today, but the actual thing itself, the noun, the verb, the everything. God is love.

The opposite of love might be hate or, as Elie Wiesel said, indifference. Hate, at least, acknowledges the existence of the other person. In fact, they often live rent free in your head if you let them, that neighbor who won’t stop borrowing a cup of sugar and a tablespoon of your emotional sanity.

Indifference is much worse. You can’t give the sugar away.

“Most of us would be entirely offended if we realized how little people thought about us,” a college friend’s dad said during a discussion on the difficulty in living life in a way where you weren’t always worried about what other people thought of you.

Hate is tied to sin, which is separation from God. The solution to the problem of hate is getting close to God. The solution to the problem of indifference?

I don’t know. I guess if you love your neighbor as yourself, that might work.

Being free from hate sounds more realistic than being free from indifference. On the many days when my life feels small and unnecessary—peak indifference, if you will—I talk to God and repeat the Bible verses which let me know He knows me very well and is the one who decided I ought to exist. I am not forgotten by the Creator of the universe, even if no letters arrive in the mail that day.

This is a world full of people we think are full of hate towards the other, but I wonder if it really isn’t a problem of indifference. What drives us for notice, fame, platform, attention, and all the stupid stuff we do online but a fear of people indifferent to our existence?

These are random thoughts of which you might be indifferent to, but whenever I see that sidewalk downtown, I have to wonder what the city thought when they realized someone took a stick, threw a bone to The Troubles, and muffed up their North Dakota Scandinavian German sidewalk.