Tempted by Hate
I have been writing about compassion in this newsletter for years. I’ve been insisting that diminishment and cynical denigration only work against liberation. I’ve advocated for intolerance of bigotry in any direction, targeting any group of people with only one or two things in common.
Oh, how all that is challenged right now.
Practicing compassion, earnest curiosity, accountability, and grace aligns with my own moral universe and, more importantly for the work I do, it’s strategically sound. Plenty of research, wisdom, and experience affirms the power of those practices to shift systems toward liberation.
Until they run up against the ugly wall of a moral universe that doesn’t care if people thrive, or even live at all.
That’s when my commitment falters, when I’m tempted to abandon my practice. My impulse is to sneer at the keepers and actors of that moral universe, to self-righteously question their intelligence, even to wish they would suffer. I am dangerously tempted by hate.
Many with far graver experiences and ancestries of harm than I have warned against hate in the service of liberation. Activists and teachers I’ve admired all of my adult life – Bayard Rustin, Bell Hooks, Audre Lorde, Grace Lee Boggs, to name just a few – advocated for compassion, even for love. They shaped their lives around fierce and unyielding resistance to cruelty, injustice, and violence. They all insisted that change comes from changing people and communities, changing systems, not only the people in power.
Bayard Rustin said, “The only way to reduce ugliness in the world is to reduce it in yourself.” I respectfully offer an amendment: without reducing the ugliness in myself, I won’t be able to counter the ugliness in the world.
Only from that place can I summon the strength to remain nonviolent as others goad me to violence to create an excuse for more cruel limitation. Only by reducing the ugliness in myself can I think clearly about what I will do in the face of a moral universe that doesn’t care if people thrive.
Otherwise, I join in the hate, or I give in to despair. Neither will do any good; either will only give strength to that ugly wall.
I don’t need to look far to see people acting with tremendous courage, putting their bodies, livelihoods, and lives on the line to counter a cruel moral power. All I’m asking of myself is the courage to recommit to practicing compassion, curiosity, accountability, and grace. To eschew bigotry. To stay the course of non-violence.
Not least, to think hard on my own and with others, to look harder than I did yesterday for things I can do to refute the ugliness in the world – and then, with no excuses, do it.
-Lucinda Garthwaite, Founder & Executive Director