Rest assured, love still trumps hate

What is it about hate?
We all know that God’s greatest gift is love.
We also know that love is fragile, and we know that love endures.
But hate endures as well, much like that stain on the carpet you’ll never get rid of.
Unlike love, it doesn’t occur naturally. It has to be taught.
We are born with a capacity for both, and our lives are shaped largely by which one dominates.
Lives shaped by love can be tragic or happy; either way, there is a sense of fulfillment. Lives shaped by hate are ultimately always empty.
Recent events had me thinking back to the summer of 1969. I was hitchhiking and camping solo across Europe, just another lucky college kid trying to make sense of the world.
It was in Brussels, I believe, where I ran into the world of hate headlong.
I was camping in a park on the edge of the city in my crappy little pup tent, cooking my meals over a butane single burner primus stove.
But at that campground, I met a young Algerian guy, maybe two or three years older than I was. We ran into one another at the campground cantina, a place to buy a Coke or a cup of coffee at the end of the day.
The Algerian guy said he was writing a novel, and when he found out that I was trying to write as well, we hit it off.
At least we did until he started to share the philosophy that shaped his novel.
There is this amazing document, he told me, that explains how the world works and why some are oppressed and others are on top.
There is, he said, this thing called “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”
It explains everything, he said.
And he showed me the book/pamphlet he was talking about.
I did not know at that point that “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” was claptrap propaganda written by the Russian tsars’ secret police as a way of scapegoating Jews and encouraging pogroms. It was a phony, cooked-up way to hang onto power by giving the poorest peasantry someone else to be angry with.
Its implicit message: Don’t blame the Russian nobility for your hardships. Blame the Jews.
I know that now but suspected it then.
What’s interesting is that while I suspected at first glance the document was cooked up to inspire anti-semitic hatred, the Algerian guy didn’t have a clue. He took it as gospel because it fit so easily into the framework of resentment and hatred that had already been carefully taught.
The “Protocols” took root in fertile ground where hatred was ready to grow.
I lost the argument that night with the Algerian guy. He was too firmly invested in his hatred to begin to hear another point of view.
And I think of him often, every time I hear of a jihadist detonating a bomb, every time I hear someone toss out the N-word like a grenade, every time I hear a white supremacist rant about “taking the country back.”
That’s when I try to reassure myself that God’s greatest gift is love.