Hate

Hate

Hate is fear directed outward on to something or someone outside the self. It is far easier to hate than to love; easier to vilify than to understand; easier to direct your fear and insecurity on to someone else than to confront your own deficiencies. Hate gives a simple answer to a complex question: what is the nature of humans and our relationship with others.

When guns are added to fear and hate you get violence; you get America.
The nation was founded on fear. From first contact Europeans feared the indigenous people of the Americas, who often out numbered them, whom they did not understand and whose land, resources and often personages (via slavery and rape) they stole. Almost all early North American contact was rooted in violence, either at first meeting, as in the case of Columbus who killed and enslaved the Arawak, Cortez, who attacked the Incas, or soon there after, as the invaders stole land and resources. The common thread was violence and the superiority of guns. America’s gun culture began on day one. Superiority in weaponry helped Europeans convince themselves they were superior in culture and intellect, providing the justification for genocide and slavery. All this was internalized as manifest destiny, American exceptionalism and white supremacy.

What was happening in North America was only one facet of the world-wide rise of colonialism. While colonialism did not invent human conflict, violence or distrust, the historic scale of exploitation and subjugation brought global violence, exploitation and subjugation. Nearly three quarters of the world was turned into property: i.e. lands and people deemed owned by European nations. Fear and violence were the instruments used to control these vast colonies and those instruments were based on weaponry. No where has that embrace of weaponry from hand guns to nuclear bombs equaled what has occurred in the United States.

Hate and fear are self reinforcing. They also tend to be contagious such that additional targets are easily added. In the US, Jews, Asians, Irish, Italians, Gays, Mexicans, Arabs and others have been targets. This expanding web provides fertile ground for conspiracy theories and a deepening entrenchment of fear and hatred. To hate is to deny the humanity of "others" and to assert your primacy. But as occurred with American slavery, the fear flows both ways: both the oppressed and the oppressor live in fear of each other. Perhaps hate and fear were most fully realized in slavery both as a defining institution and in the individual brutality of beatings, rape and murder. Slaves were considered chattel in the same way that livestock were. As someone who grew up on a dairy farm, we understood that our cows provided our livelihood, so our cows were well cared for, properly fed and never abused. Interestingly slaves, to an even greater degree, supported plantation elites with a grand lifestyle and great affluence, yet these very instruments wealth and privilege were brutalized by their owners. Why would that be? Fear. Despite the rhetoric of the happy slave, owners lived in fear, knowing their slaves wanted to escape their bondage and might kill them to achieve freedom. So the slave owners’ fear was channeled into hate and the construct of black inferiority to mask their guilt and justify their abuse.

After the civil war, this hate was reconstituted in Jim Crow economic slavery, i.e. peonage and civic suppression in politics, jobs and property, all enforced by institutionalized violence. Today the legacy of this fear and hatred remains.
This unrelenting violence is but a continuation of the drive for white supremacy, yet with the unrestricted proliferation of guns it has also taken on an unintended consequence. Whites are killing themselves and each other in record numbers. The "good guy" with a gun turns out to be most dangerous to himself and his family. The response, as always, is to buy more guns and have fewer restrictions on ownership. In many places cans of spray paint are subject to more restrictions than guns. Fear has allowed people to believe that guns represent safety while the body count increases.

If hate is spawned by fear and fear with a gun is violence, then to stop the carnage we would need to remove the fear or the gun. Instead we accept the daily killings as what passes for normal in this country. That is something to really fear.