Until last summer, my niece attended a terrific summer camp where, every day would begin with all the campers reciting this story: Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up, it knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn't matter whether you're the lion or a gazelle-when the sun comes up, you'd better be running. I love that story.
It struck me the other day that while predation occurs in nature and the threat of it occurs in this story, hate does not. Lions and gazelles don't hate each other. Gazelles fear, understandably, lions, tigers, hyenas and other apex predators, but they don't hate them. They give them a wide berth but hate? I asked myself, a propos of Dallas, TX why, if hate isn't a natural state, we spend so much time and energy on it. Why have we invented this thing that seems to serve zero useful purpose? And then I had to ask myself if the violence we perpetrate against other groups is a natural outgrowth of the hate we've manufactured, what are we to do about it?
I've wondered for five days now what I could possibly say about Dallas that made any sense. I've wondered whether there was any sense to be made of Dallas. Finally today, the story of the lion and the gazelle came to me.
We will never truly know the perpetrator's motivations. We can piece a story together, but we will never know the totality of his internal dialog or the series of experiences that brought him to this point. He may have had PTSD consequent upon his military service. He could have had PTSD consequent upon his experience as a person of color in America. We will never know. What we do know is that the hate, that manufactured useless emotion, brought him to a tipping point. Are there others teetering on the edge? I want to hope not, but that is a foolish hope. The things that pushed this shooter over the edge are potentially pushing others. The response to this shooting may serve as catalyst for someone else. And so here we are, at this place once again, awash in tears, anger and blood. And still more hate.
Does hate occur in nature? I don't think so. Is it a creation of human kind? It certainly seems to be. Is it a natural state? No, I do not think that it is. If it were, gazelles would hate lions; and plankton and whales would be at war. But, you say, we are greater than they! We are more advanced than they! We are better than they! Are we really? I'm not so sure.
I think we manufacture reasons to hate through narratives we tell ourselves. We are ignorant and therefore fearful. We would rather hate on the basis of ignorance than lean in to the fear and find out the truth. God forbid we have to dislodge some of our long-held beliefs! Out of fear, we create reasons to hate and then we infect others with it. Instead of trying to find out about each other, and dislodge the fear of the unknown, we manufacture stories and an alternate reality and then, we corral the 'other', the gazelles, up and put 'em in that reality. Eventually, we act upon this manufactured thing as if it were real.
Hate does not occur in nature. Lions don't hate gazelles, they are but the next necessary meal. Whales don't hate plankton. And yet, each of the former feeds on the latter. Perhaps we need to stop and figure out that we don't need to feed on each other to survive? It's not kill or be killed. We're not on the Serengeti Plain....most of us. Maybe if we didn't think of the universe as zero sum we might be able to find a better way to coexist.
Hate may have started this but I'm pretty sure it won't end it. Hate is a carousel. It sits in one place and goes around and around. It will not get us far. If we want to put some distance between ourselves and this carousel, we're going to have to jump off, risk injury and run like hell.
I don't think too deeply about this or any other shooter other than to wonder what broke in him to get him to this point, but I do spend a lot of time wondering about hate. Don't you?
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