If you were blind, you wouldn't see I am white. If you were deaf, you wouldn't hear my accent. Would you like me then?

What does the color of their skin or shape of anyone's eyes, their dialect, have to do with their worth as a human being? Is how they voted, favorite football team, the label on their clothes or occupation deserving of your hate? Did that person, that individual living being, kill your mother or set fire to your house just to see the color of the flame? Or do they merely fit a profile of something you have an aversion, a shallow distaste for? Do you even view that as hate?

I've been called fatso, frizzy, white trash, and woman. But all the names I have been referred to in distasteful way as, hide all the good I have, but only from the one calling me names.

I have felt my hate, too. I have let my distaste seethe and prejudged immediately, for any form of vanity, celebrity-copy-cats, old men, gossipers and people with their car stereo too loud. Right away, I took a small part of who they were, a part I found unappealing and I felt my hate for them.

I knew hate had to stop within me first. I knew it really wasn't necessary for the success of my day to fuel the hate the world is already burning with.

Your hate has to stop within you first. And with little more than sharing a passing smile with another life form on the planet, we can slowly extinguish the flame of our hate enough to identify where our hate is stemming from.

We are a very intelligent species, so sure of our own complex uniqueness and worth, but then judge others so quickly and completely by one, usually visual, thing. I do believe we can think our way to understanding a person we differ from enough to not show them hate.

That White woman might pick up trash in the woods when nobody is looking. That Mexican man might have voted the same as you for the same reasons. That Black guy might donate to the same charity as you. The Asian girl might volunteer at the cancer ward at the hospital. There has to be something, one thing, agreeable about them. Can't we look for the commonality in whomever we are sharing near-by air with?

The world would be a much better place without your hate and mine and everyone else's. That is a truth, but you can only change your hate within you first, before others will move away from their hate, too.

Let's all start now Okay, I'll go first I love you.

Learn more about this author, Margo Macabee.
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