Why do children hound other children on the schoolyard, seeking out the vulnerable place in a child who is somehow seen as different? Is it because children are naturally cruel or hateful? Is it the nature of our species to target the weak and vulnerable? Are we no different than a pack of dogs who drive out the sick or infirm in a process of culling that leaves the pack stronger in the end? Or are these learned responses, suckled in the mother's milk of our cultures' unexamined beliefs and values?
What is cruelty? What is hate? Why do we carry its message deep in our hearts? We divide up our ideas about hate into race, sexual preference, lifestyle, and religion. These are the ones most of us acknowledge are hurtful and unnecessary. Yet there are so many more rooms to the house of hate that we think is rooted deep in our hearts.
We hate the unfamiliar – we fear the unfamiliar, the new and unusual. We hate the old and familiar – we fear the old and familiar. Hate is fear. We are a peculiar species, holding on to our fear as though it were life itself. Hate and fear are taught in a thousand different ways every day, in ways so subtle that we never see the message, only the result.
Children are not cruel. Have you ever seen an infant, a newborn, strike out? Somewhere between birth and toddlerhood, something changes. As a child begins to reach out and explore the world, typically she or he is greeted with a new idea: NO; don't touch; don't break; don't do that. The great and holy impulse to be not afraid of the new and unfamiliar is met by adults as a threat. It may be a threat to things -- that might get broken; to pride -- what will other people think if my child runs up and down the grocery store aisles; to the child -- that plug may electrocute them.
And so adults meet a child's fearlessness with their own fear and begin the subtle message that fear has value, is more important than exploration, fearlessness, faith. This may be the first and most subtle message in hate that a child receives.
The child must experience these unfathomable restrictions as "when I am excited about something new, and I want to learn and reach out, I create anger in those around me; my impulse to learn is dangerous; my enthusiasm is wrong; I am bad. Mommy and Daddy are acting like they hate me; I should hate myself." Setting limits with a child is very important, but HOW we set them is just as important.
Fear and hate can only be put out into the world when it exists in our hearts in the first place. If we have no capacity to feel them, we would not display them. Hatred or fear put out towards other people is born in the hatred and fear we feel about ourselves. Fear is the child of our self-distrust.
There are many ways we institutionalize hatred. Any social or political policy that makes a situation worse, and not better, is rooted in some form of fear. Any policy or belief system that accepts that it is okay for a human being to suffer is projecting the belief that suffering is acceptable and normal. We pile on reasons for why it is okay for some to suffer. We remove ourselves from the source of the problem when we find reasons to accept suffering. The farther we get from the source of the problem, the farther we get from the solution.
Hate is hate. It doesn't matter where we choose to justify it. It is no different to hate a person for being black or Jewish or gay or crippled than it is to hate a person for being poor or wrong or even criminal. When we accept hatred in any form, we accept it in all its forms.
Children are not cruel. We are not a cruel species. We have come to accept, to believe, that we are cruel. It follows from that belief that we create cruel actions. We don't have to do this. Challenge the belief in fear; notice how we choose to worship it, give it our attention, our resources. Challenge the belief in fear, and you will learn to trust yourself. Challenge your trust in fear, and you will change the world.