Legacy of Hate

The idea for this article is one that has been in my head for a while. I thought of it a few years ago, when I turned on my TV one night to hear about a violent school shooting that left children dead. This idea was recently brought back to the surface when I again turned on the TV and heard about the tagedy in Littleton, Colorado.

I decided it was time to write about something that women have been battling for centuries. I wanted to take some time to write about something that plagues our country and has no real benefits. It was time to write about hate.

As much as we try and figure out why these children did what they did, there is probably no real way to make any sense out of the senselessness. All of these school shootings, just like any kind of killings, have been senseless killings. One thing that they have all had in common was hate.

Hate is a strong and powerful emotion. Little kids toss the word out to their parents when they are young and don't get their way. I'm sure my mother eventually lost track of the number of times I whined "I hate you" to her because she didn't give me what I wanted. I, along with most of us, grew up to realize that hate is too strong of an emotion to toss out like that. Now I don't take that word for granted. Especially not after the increasing number of hate crimes that are happening around the world.

Hate crimes are not just racially or ethnically motivated. Sexism is alive and well in our society - even though we have made some great steps to conquer it. Spousal abuse, child abuse, and many other forms of abuse are sometimes rooted in sexism. There are those people who believe that a person, male or female, is somehow less of a person because of their gender. We don't give people a fair shake because none of us can truly say we see people for only as they are. Everyone has his or her own biases and prejudices that affect their perception of others. That can be considered human nature. However, hating someone to the point of shooting him or her down till they bleed to death, isn't exactly the most humane way of acting.

Many people believe that if you are a feminist, then you are anti-male or a man-hater. That's not true. It might be true that some feminists feel that way, but it isn't part of the basic feminist beliefs. Hating a gender does nothing to better a gender-bias problem. As people, we need to get past the hate we may feel for someone because of their sex, race, or ethnicity.

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