Why Love Always Defeats Hate
During Pride Month, I'm going to take a minute to talk about why love always wins. But only if we choose it.
It's June, which means it's Pride Month.
If that bothers you, if you're not down with the rainbow flag and all it stands for, then just leave now. This is an inclusive space but maybe it isn't really for you. I don't have time to waste explaining to you why, and I have no interest in your protestations that I might owe you something, whether its an explanation or my attention or anything else. If you're not on board with LGBTQIA+ rights, with intersectional feminism and racial justice and diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging, just go and leave us to our business. You are dismissed.
"Well that seems kinda harsh..." some of you might be saying to yourselves. "I thought we were gonna talk about love."
We just did.
Because we've really misunderstood what love is, what it is capable of, and why it is as powerful as it is.
The pop culture idea of love is built on the idea of tender feelings. We love cute kittens and puppies. And when we love things or people we coo and fuss over them, and we nurture them, and we feel all soft and kind. Love is warm and just wants a hug. It is gooey and pretty and filled with hearts and expansive feelings that make us open our hearts and pour ourselves out to the beloved. And that outpouring is sweet and filled with niceness and goodness, always.
If that's your understanding of what love is, you are either five years old, or hopelessly deluded. Or maybe you were recently electrocuted.
Real love contains many things. And some of them, actually, many of them, are not sweet or tender.
I have a son who is on the autism spectrum. When you have a child with a disability, you end up having to go to great lengths to help them grow up into their full potential because the world isn't really built to facilitate their thriving. Other parents who watch you try to help your child grow up, and see all the shit you need to do that they don't have to, will often try to encourage you by telling you that you're an "amazing mom" a "supermom" or that somehow you are a more loving mother than other mothers because of the lengths you are going to for your child's well-being.
It's all bullshit. I love my kid. I don't think I love him more than any other reasonably attentive mother loves their child. I am not better at parenting than they are. (Put me in charge of a neurotypical kid and I will be at a loss as to what to do, because I've only ever parented a child with autism.) The only difference between me and anyone else is that my child's needs are different and require me to do things other parents don't have to. Love means I do them.
Love means I dragged my three year old to every specialist and hospital and county program in my area to get my arms around the fact that he wasn't eating. Love means that when another child harassed my kid at school I walked into the Principal's office and asked what he intended to do about it. Love means that when his cousin used a slur to refer to my son I verbally dressed him down at a family dinner in a restaurant so that he understood that he is never to say such a thing ever again to anyone (and told my brother to go pound sand when he tried to tell me I shouldn't have been so hard on him.)
Because I love my son, I am a soft touch with him sometimes. I look at him, and sometimes my heart gets so full I think it might burst. I want to hug him tight and make sure he knows he's the best thing that has ever happened to me. And the gods cannot save someone who harms him -- because I am fully capable of carving someone’s heart out with a spoon if the situation demands it.
I am also capable of doing what's needed to help him be a better person too. Kid learned pretty early that if he was in time out it did not matter how much he screamed or cried, momma wasn't going to relent until he'd gotten to a place where he was able to address matters calmly. I could wait all day. If I had to heave him over my shoulder and carry him out of a crowded restaurant or a grocery store to the car, I would do it, without a word. It was patience and stubbornness and the maturity to realize that he needed to know I could be relied on to do what I said would, whether it was a promise to get him a birthday cake or a declaration that a certain behavior would not be tolerated. When people talk about children needing "discipline," what they really should realize is that the person who must exercise the discipline, and control their own reactions and behaviors, is the parent. The child is still learning, and their inability to be consistent is nothing more than the realities of their stage of life. My job was to create a compassionate, consistent, and safe space for him to figure out what was expected of him. Love is taking on the commitment and effort needed to maintain that space.
Love is having the humility to admit when you are wrong, really apologize, and commit to doing better going forward.
Love is walking away when you know when you can't make anything better by your presence.
Love is staying because you know that you're needed, even if it costs you to do so.
Love is leaving when you've been asked to, because it's what they want. Even though you know you could help.
Love is telling someone they are not welcome, because their presence harms others.
Love will inspire people to create masterpieces. Love will drive someone to self-immolate.
Love lives in a place where all things are possible. And because of that, love is an engine that can drive so many things.
Hate, on the other hand, offers few possibilities.
Hate is a form of tunnel vision. Hate zeroes in on a thing and makes that thing the object of all a person's rage, resentment, and sense of injustice. The object of hatred can hold no good. It can only be a bad thing that must be annihilated. Hate doesn't care much how that happens so long as it is swift, painful and complete. And hate doesn't really have time for anything that isn't part of the plan to fulfill their plan to kill the thing they are obsessed with.
Hate can get creative, but only in maters of destruction and pain. Hate's only vision for bettering the world is by destroying the object of its hate. The things that hate builds and creates are pointy, nasty things that don't really make anyone feel good. Fear is the most common emotion hate trades off of. Making you fear the object of hate is a big priority.
Both love and hate require a great deal of directed energy. They are both deep and intense, and will reach into the depths of a person's soul.
The difference is, hate is a one trick pony. Hate can only do one thing -- spew itself over its object in a hope they can cover it in shame and violence and destroy it.
Love, in contrast, builds and creates. Love connects people to each other. Love makes everything it touches more real, more vibrant, more important. Love can do the hard things that are needed to make things grow or become better. Love will admit the truth, even when it is hard, because love lives to transcend obstacles and problems and grow. Love has the vision to see a future full of good things, things that are strong and hopeful. Love lives in the future. Love lives as big as it can.
Hate lives only in the past. Hate tries to make you fear the future, and long for a past when the object of its hate didn't exist, or wasn't as powerful as it is now. Often the past hate imagines never really existed. Hate makes up lies when the truth is inconvenient. Hate feeds off of its delusions about the world. Its how hate justifies itself.
Hate usually doesn't win because hate doesn't have the ability to sustain itself for very long. It gets shown for the empty, blind thing that it is. Particularly when it tries to oppose love. When people see the two things standing in opposition to each other in close quarters, it becomes very clear which side is the better of the two.
Love will always be more powerful, more real, more alive, more everything than hate. Love will do extraordinary things in its own name. Feats of power and strength and joy and silliness and rage and grief and kindness and ecstasy. All of that may be contained in the province of love. Love is a big country with all manner of terrain and climate -- wide, rolling green fields and tall, craggy mountains and cities teeming with life. The province of love holds sunny days and storms, rainbows and hurricanes. Love has an ocean that is broad and deep and filled with life. Hate is a tiny walled city that no one ventures out from very much. And no matter what is happening in the sky overhead, hate will tell you it's always raining. '
Given a choice, we all know where we'd rather live.
The real enemy, the real thing that could threaten love isn't really hate -- it's apathy and laziness. The choice of not feeling anything, of not choosing anything at all, that is what most threatens our progress as a human race. Because when people don't choose, then hate can get enough purchase to start pushing out love and dominating the field.
The lesson of LGBTQIA+ Pride Month is that LOVE WINS. But only if we choose to feel it. Love asks us to throw ourselves into the fray and give a shit about something other than yourself. To live in a big country where things are sometimes great and sometimes not. It's scary. It's a lot to take on. But nothing will make you feel more alive than choosing to love. And the funny part is, it almost doesn't matter what or who you choose to love. The act of loving is going to grow you, going to make your life better. It is never a mistake to love someone or something, even if in the end, the love is never fully realized or falls apart in some way. Becoming a lover, someone who loves, is what makes you bigger and better as a human.
The reason Pride Month expresses itself as it does is because that’s how love is. It is wild and free and riotous and passionate and colorful and noisy and filled with dancing. It is also a trans woman thowing a brick during a police raid.
The reason hate seems to be winning is not because it's in any way stronger than love. It's because too many people have chosen not to love at all, to stay safe in a space where they are never at risk, where nothing happens, and nothing makes them feel anything. That's not living. That's existence. And while it's better than the alternative, it's not the best we can do.
Love is going to push you. Love is going to invigorate you. Love is going to challenge you. Love is going to inspire you. Love is going to make you more than what you are. Love is waiting for you to choose it. So is hate. And then there is the lure of not choosing, the promise that you don't have to do so much or be so much. You can be safe and small and loveless, on the sidelines of everything.
The inimitable Grace Hopper, one of the greatest scientists and mathematicians of the 20th Century and a Rear Admiral in the US Navy, once said, "A ship is safest in the harbor. But that is not what ships are built for."
Remember that LOVE WINS. But only if you choose it. And Love is what you were built for. It's not safe. But it will make you more alive than you are now.
Get out there and choose love.
Happy Pride Month, Witches.
Blessed be.