The War On Hate

Post No Hate Photo by Jon Tyson

Seems some people have declared war on hate, because hating people is bad. (It might still be okay to hate things, I dunno.) On the other hand, can you imagine a war, a real shooting, killing the enemy kid of war, without hate? I am pretty sure whipping the population into a hating frenzy is a necessary precondition to waging a real shooting war.

So maybe our current war on hate isn't really a hateful war, maybe it's a war of love where we are all going to love our neighbors and nobody is going to hate anybody else every again. Except it sure sounds like someone is trying to whip the population into a hating frenzy, what with all the riots and vandalism.

So maybe the problem isn't that there isn't enough love to go around, maybe the problem is we haven't had a real kick ass war in a long time, a war that mobilized the entire country, a war that everyone, or at least a solid majority could get behind, a war where you could hate the enemy. You know, kind of like WW2.

Yes, I know, war is bad, lots of people get killed, lots of stuff gets destroyed, but by gum, it focuses your attention on important things, like killing the enemy, which might be our primary instinct. It's more important than food or sex or companionship. It's kind of like the 2nd amendment. If you can't defend yourself (which in the bad old days meant killing the enemy), none of your other rights mean anything.

War is a fundamental part of being human. We've been fighting wars for a zillion years, probably ten times longer than we have had a written history, which is basically a record of all the wars we've fought.

But now the first world has entered a kind of warless state and it's left a big hole in our hateful hearts. It would be nice if we could find something constructive to fill that hole. Some people have jobs and families and are motoring along just fine, but there are a bunch of people who don't have jobs, aren't happy with their lives or don't have anything else to do but raise a stink about whatever everyone else is raising a stink about.

Problem is that with the current economic situation, it's hard to give everyone something to do. Amazon is trying by hiring thousands of people, and while those jobs might be lifelines for the desperate, I don't think Amazon is going to save us.

A new religion might save us. The old established Christian religions just don't seem to have the mass appeal that they used to, possibly because we have beaten the natural world into a semblance of submission and so we aren't properly terrified anymore. Of course this is how we got environmental activists and our current epidemic of social justice warriors. Maybe this is trade-off. No more all consuming wars, instead we get just a constant stream of noise from obnoxious gadflies.

People come in several flavors of stupid. One form of stupidity causes people to latch onto to the last thing they heard. Someone told them something, might be true, might be a complete fabrication, but for some reason the person who hears it believes it, at least for a while, until it gets shoved aside by a new tidbit of information that catches their ear. This explains why we are lurching from one pseudo-crisis to another. Our modern communications systems ensure that these tidbits get widely disseminated, which is why a pandemic was getting all the attention last week and some twisted version of civil rights protests are now making headlines.

We need an economic recovery that will put large number of people to work doing something they can believe in. I don't see a new Sun God appearing anytime soon, but maybe we could start a public works project rebuilding roads and bridges the old fashioned way, the way the Roman's did it. Hand built with hand cut stones carried by hand.

Problem we've had lately is that the high tech solutions get all the money and all the attention, mostly because those are the ones that promise to deliver a profit of some kind (sometimes it's a profit because the federal government is paying for it). What we need is some kind of incentive that gives credit to companies putting large numbers of people to work.

We wouldn't need to do anything if people could find non-destructive ways to keep themselves amused, but not everyone is capable of that. Some people require social interaction, and if a riot is the only social interaction available, well then, that'll do. I suppose we should thank the video game makers for keeping zillions of people glued to their video screens, otherwise we might be having some really fabulous riots.