I love you, you hate me...

With the anniversary of 9/11, a lot of people are experiencing a revival of the feelings they had during and following the tragedy. And a lot of what people felt was hate. This works well for the current administration, since they’ve been in the business of keeping us afraid and hating for five years now. Why would they do that? Why, to keep us under control, of course. An easy way to keep people from noticing what you’re doing (or not doing) is to point at someone else and say: there’s the cause of all your problems. They don’t need us to love them, as long as they can keep us hating someone else more.

As a bear being raised by humans, I’ve become curious as to why it’s so much easier for people to hate than it is to love. Finally, after much thought, I think I have the answer: love is not an emotion that helps you survive. Love of your children may keep you from drowning them at birth, but it does nothing to keep you alive. That is not to say it’s not a powerful emotion – watch children and you’ll see masters of emotional manipulation. A kid knows instinctively how to act to endear itself to adults – and therefore how to get what it wants. But watch kids around each other and, if they don’t know you’re there, you’ll see a lot of more basic emotions come into play. A dog pack has nothing on a pack of kids – kids use intimidation much more often than friendship to get what they want from each other.

So how does hate keep you safe? Well, hate isn’t really a single emotion – it’s a combination of fear and aggression. And those two things are critical to survival on the most basic level. Therefore, anyone that can keep you digging into your primary emotions can keep you under control – for awhile. The problem is, that’s a difficult line to walk. Sooner or later, you preach enough hate and the hate will turn on you. Governments don’t generally worry about that for several reasons – one of which is the temporary nature of the job. Another is the very human sense that it’ll never happen to ME. But it will – it always does. Hate always turns on the haters. And it doesn’t have to be like this. People can be more than puppets for power-mongers to play with.  And love is what makes life worth living.  I know I'm only a little bear, but surely things can be better.