Hating people is easy

I followed links to find another important voice on the internet. This is John Pavlovitz and his blog Stuff That Needs To Be Said. His “about” page says he is a pastor in Wake Forest, North Carolina and also a writer and activist committed to equality, diversity, and justice within and outside faith communities. I read a few of his recent posts and I very much like what I read. I’ll likely quote him in the future.

From a post Hating People is Easy. Loving Them Isn’t:

At the unnaturally accelerated pace we live and move through the world, we simply don’t have time to linger with people long enough to really see them or hear them, let alone imagine they might have a perspective we could learn from—or worse yet, that we might actually like them. We grab a quick cue from their profiles: a political affiliation, a religious expression, a retweet source, and on that spindly, fragile skeleton, we instantly create a human being we can attach all our fears, biases, and past wounds to.

Toxic tribalism thrives in such relational shorthand. I can view someone across the social media chasm, and in an instant I can size them up, remove any nuance or humanity, and fully caricaturize them into the irredeemable adversary I need. That makes hating them much easier for me—and hating them is just a hell of a lot quicker and simpler than knowing or understanding them.
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We’re all going to have to figure out how to do the difficult work of loving people we dislike.
We’re going to have to stop creating false stories about people from a safe distance, and get truer stories. We’re going to have to find a way to offer an open hand as often as a clenched fist. We’re going to need to slow down enough, and get close enough proximity to our supposed enemies, so that we can look in the whites of their eyes and find the humanity residing there. It may be buried in jagged, ugly layers of fear and grief and hopelessness—but it is almost always there.

I don’t like to think about the humanity of people when they are acting inhumanely, mostly because I don’t want them to get away with something. I don’t want to risk giving tacit consent to the terrible things they do, to the wounds they inflict, to the violence they manufacture—and the simplest way to do this, seems to be to despise them.

Pavlovitz related an incident where he was one of several people asked to speak. At the back of the audience were members of an alt-right group who loudly heckled the speakers. Pavlovitz, when it was his turn to speak, admitted he ended up shouting about the love of God. He was aware of the irony.

But the next speaker, Genesis B., said:

Before I share my story I want to speak to my potential future co-collaborators back there. I don’t see you as my enemies, but my potential co-collaborators. I want to know if any of you would be willing to come up here and embrace me.

One man came forward and they hugged. Afterward, the heckling continued, but with a lot less volume and anger.

Pavlovitz concludes:

Hating people is always going to be the easier and more expedient path than loving them, because loving them means seeing them fully, hearing them, stepping into their skin as best we can, and finding something worth embracing.

I wonder if we can do that.

I wonder if I can.

A second post by Pavlovitz is titled, It’s Inhumane Not to Want Someone to Have Healthcare. To those who fight to take away life-saving care, who applaud the exclusion of the already sick, he says:

What is wrong with your heart?

How did you make it this far in life without acquiring basic empathy?

If you’re a professed Christian, what is your understanding of your faith tradition, that you would place yourself opposite the side of healing wounds?

This isn’t a political or a financial issue after all, it’s a philosophical and an ethical one. It has nothing to do with funding (because every other developed nation seems to have figured it out), it’s about whether or not you give enough of a damn about another human being, not to place barriers between them and staying healthy or staying alive. This is a pass-fail test of simple decency.
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Underlying the opposition to universal healthcare is ultimately selfishness; the belief that I am forever living in scarcity, that someone else’s gain must automatically be my loss, that if another person receives, then I might be left with nothing. The level of self-preservation is toxic, but worse than that, there is an insidious, twisted resentment of strangers at work here, that doesn’t want someone else to “get away with something,” to cheat the system and pull one over on us (and you know, not die). This callousness is a national cancer that seems to be metastasizing in these days, and we need to attend to it.

We should stop pretending that this is about making an unreasonable and unprecedented financial sacrifice for someone else. We all pay for roads for everyone, for education for everyone, for missiles for everyone. We can find a way to pay for medicine for everyone. That’s not what this about.

Our shared humanity is at stake here, and you care enough to defend it or you don’t.

Another human being not dying, is either a priority for you or it’s not.

People being allowed to stay healthy and alive and with the people who love them is either a pressing issue—or it isn’t.

If the latter in any of these cases is true, it is the symptom of a far more grave illness.

Just after the new Congress was sworn in Rep. Rashida Tlaib used a cussword when saying she very much wants to impeach the nasty guy. That prompted Pavlovitz to say a few things about the reaction to Tlaib’s choice of words. The post is titled I Don’t Care About a Congresswoman Cussing (And Neither Do You).

If dropping an MF-bomb or profanity or coarse language were at all offensive to you, you wouldn’t have voted for this President a couple of weeks after hearing him talk about women like they’re pieces of garbage—would you?
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I care that families are being separated.
I care that medical bills are bankrupting people.
I care that we’re drowning in guns and daily shootings.
I care that Muslims are caricatured into terrorists, migrants into advancing hordes, and LGBTQ people into imminent threats, by our elected leaders.

That is the start of a very long list of things that Pavlovitz cares about.

I wish you cared about those things. You don’t. I wish injustice as discrimination and inequality were offensive to you. They aren’t. I wish marginalized people could merit such passion from you. They don’t.

That offends me.