Tuesday, May 19, 2015

Love vs. Hate

Love.

It's all too precious a resource, and at times it is easy to think the world is running out.

Like air, we need love to live.

Like air, we need to share it with everyone else.

It's so easy to hate. It's so easy to spread. It's so easy to fire off a backhanded insult and walk away, leaving a crater of emotional damage and silent regrets.

Love is hard. Hate is easy.

Love takes bravery.

Hate is for cowards.

Yet, I see people selling hate and fear everyday. And we keep buying it. Insecurity, fear, prejudice, and envy are all worth big money. Just look at commercials blasting messages that we are somehow sick and we need this pill or we will die. News networks that are 24-7 breaking news alerts, endlessly, day after day, making you panic at the bass drum roll and hallowed bell toll because...a celebrity said something stupid in Hollywood.

And then the adrenaline subsides, but it stay with us like the poison of too much sugar in our foods. Until the next commercial comes on that strips away our securities, or the next news alert that rings the death bell and sounds the gallows drum roll because a new taco came out at some fast food restaurant.

The lesson? You can take hate and fear to the bank. It works.

But that adrenaline rush from the hate or the fear they sell us lingers. Like too much sugar in our diet, it stays in our system for a long time. We become addicted to it. It raises our blood pressure point by point as it builds. It drains our energy. It's not natural. Fear and hate are poison to us, and the slow tick of each moment of anger or heartbeat of fear builds up in us as we feel less in control every day.

Am I going to wrap this up with a slogan or a simple answer that makes you feel good? I can't. It would be dishonest to end this by saying, "Love will make everything better!" and let you go back to your normal life with a warm feeling. Because this doesn't end here. Hate doesn't end here.

It ends with us.

It ends with you.

It ends with a struggle not unlike mankind's decision to go to the moon, or to beat cancer, or to end hunger. This is an everyday fight for every day for the rest of your life sort of thing. It's a conscious decision by every one of us to refuse to add another drop of hate into that toxic ocean that pervades our world, with every moment hate offers us to, with every heartbeat fear takes from us - we must stand strong and refuse to let one drop of hate go back into this world.

Never let that drop of hateful blood sail free into that great ocean of misery and tears.

It means holding back. I told you this was hard, but changing our ways for the better of everyone always is. You'll need to show us how brave and strong you are every day by refusing to participate in the shared madness of maniac culture.

Recycle your hate, compost it into love.

Turn away. Turn negative energy into positive energy. Ignore being drawn into a fight. Spread love and understanding. Let others be. Respect opinions. Be constructive.

Understand.

Feel those drops of adrenaline subside. Feel how much better your life becomes by denying anger and fear. Notice how calm you become, no matter what happens in your life. You become slowly immune, and your outlook and health improve.

Accept.

If anything, do this for yourself.

Love.

1 comment:

  1. In my experience, hate is not the opposite of love -- the opposite of love is apathy. You have to care in order to hate.

    One thing's certain: dark and bloody is much easier to write than comedy. And despite the nay-say and doubt, Romance is hard too. Humor and the deeper emotions explored in good Romance take some serious skill to deliver. You can fake being smart, you can't fake being funny.

    Horror and even thrillers, come with a 'built in' emotional connection. The reader dives in, and "partners up" with any sign of tension building and rising threat levels -- and tension, fear, anxiousness, arousal, dread, foreboding, fright - these are all what psychology calls - basic emotions. And that terminology fits very well with writers. They are fairly simple to produce, and to demonstrate through the characters in actions. i.e. pacing the room, biting their nails, running their fingers through their hair, snapping at each other, checking weapons several times, etc.

    Comedy and Romance both deal with "complex emotions" which are not so easy to "perform" through action or to produce in the reader.

    Each basic emotion has a distinctive facial expressions and for most of them there is evidence of distinctive physiological responses, distinctive changes in the voice and evidence of cognitive phenomena like focusing attention on the emotion's stimulus These 'reactions' and visual displays are multicultural as well. Tribes found in remote areas -- unhampered by mixing with society at large -- demonstrate similar if not exact visible signs..Even various animals display similar 'body language' for some of the basic emotions.

    More complex emotions however are not so universal, nor simple to demonstrate.. such as -- ‘the experience of existential dread by considering your own death’ or the 'revulsion of witnessing the violation of a worshiped mentor's strength and the deterioration of their degraded spirit' -- or the complex models which develop the 'urges of spousal murder developed from the build up of jealousy based on no physical evidence'

    These more complex emotions are the paradigm of something that happens without regard for the consequences -- which adds even further burden to the writer to bring them out as an experience for the reader.

    ReplyDelete

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