I’m sitting at my computer this morning reading about the hatred expressed yesterday evening at UVA, thinking about an extremely interesting BackStory episode about race in America, and getting ready to go to Hamilton this evening… and I’m thinking about how this country started with speaches about freedom, liberty, and justice from one side of their mouth, and hatred for the other coming out the other side. Before the founding of this country, there was hatred based not on skin color, but on country of origin. It was America — Virginia, in particular — that created the distinction between “white” and “black”. It was America that created race hatred. It is America that has amplified hatred of foreigners — be they African, Irish, Italian, Chinese, or from the Middle East. It is American that has pushed hatred of others based on political party, on sexual orientation, on size, on appearance.
For a country that is about freedom and liberty, we’re damn judgemental. I blame the Puritans.
If we are going to succeed as a nation, and continue to prosper, we must get past this hate. We must unite against it. The “other” is not out to get it; homogeneity is not the answer to piece. Our nation was built upon the other. Our nation was built on the melting pot of ideas and, yes, cultures. Our nation wasn’t built on one side winning and the other side losing, but on compromise — on finding that middle group that moves us incrementally forward, ever advancing, ever improving, ever shaping our society to be better than it was before.
Since the 1990s, our politics have become increasingly divisive. The other side is not just wrong, they are evil. There is no reconciliation with evil, no granting them of any quarter. That’s wrong. Different ideas are not evil, they are just different. Refugees are not out to get us; they are out to make peaceful homes for their families. Gays and Transgenders are not out to destroy the cis world; they are just out to live their lives in piece. Almost all of us (except for a few aberrations) was the same thing: to live in peace, to have a safe place to live, to be able to earn enough to take care of our families, to love, to be loved, and hopefully, to leave the world a better place than we found it.
Let us remember what binds us together, and not see in another’s ascent an implication of our descent. There’s a meme going around that points out that the world isn’t pie: one person being successful doesn’t always comes at the expense of another.
Or, in the words of The Mad Show: (music by Mary Rodgers, lyrics by Stephen Sondehim):
We’re gonna stamp out hate
That’s our creed
Wipe out violence, intolerance and greed
We’re gonna start right now
Tomorrow is too late
We’re gonna stamp out hate.
We’re gonna stamp out hate
Stamp it in the ground
And then take happiness and spread it all around
We’ll put an end to grief
We can hardly wait
We’re gonna stamp out hate.
We’re gonna stamp out hate
Sock it in the eye
Shoot it in the stomach yelling, die, die, die!
We’ll pull its insides out
And look at look at what it ate
We’re gonna stamp out hate.
We’re gonna stamp out hate
Lash it with a switch
Amputate its arms and legs and see how long they twitch
We’ll put its toes on hooks
And dangle them for bait
We’re gonna stamp out hate.
Over the past few weeks, there have been quite a few articles I’ve uncovered related to California and Los Angeles history: