A Vicious Cycle
Hate vs. Hate

By Shane Collins

When we watch T.V. or read the news these days, we very often see people taking strong, aggressive stands for or against various causes. From religion to politics, to national/global economy, to war and crime, as well as many other issues, there is a commonality about where many people choose to put their attention, and how they then act based on that.  That commonality is anger and the hatred that comes out of a strong focus on anger.

As the world becomes more and more closely connected through inter-dependant economies and technological advances, the influence each person exerts on their environment has an increasingly far-reaching effect on people in other environments. The idea of seeing ourselves as separate from others is an illusion. Each person’s ripple in the big pond travels farther, and faster, than it used to, and right now, anger is one of the biggest ripples reverberating. While that is not particularly new, what is new is a pervasiveness of angry images in people’s homes, on the T.V., the internet, and other media sources, gathered from around the world and broadcast, often, as they happen.

Logic states that what we put our attention upon manifests; as we continue to make the same type of choices, more and more of the same results occur. This is an example of the ‘much makes more’ principle, and it applies to anything. For example, many of us find that when we are thinking excessively about a car we are considering buying, we begin to notice that same car everywhere we go. In world events, however, we are seeing people put their attention on something very detrimental – hatred – and as a result, people are taking warlike stances, responding to hatred with more hatred. It’s not that we shouldn’t be aware of what goes on in the world, but we must be careful about where we choose to put our attention, and be aware of how we’re affected by what we see. If we keep feeding our minds with angry images, it does nothing to uplift the whole. People see hatred displayed in world and local situations, and there’s a strong urge to fight back against it. Fighting back produces the same feeling one is fighting. This hard focus on hatred intensifies people’s responses to hatred.

In November of 2007, thousands of people staged a rally in Washington D.C., encircling the Justice Department headquarters, demanding the government take a harder stance on hate crimes. According to Rev. Al Sharpton, who was quoted in a CNN article, it was a “real outcry, a real outrage from people around the country.” (italics mine) The protesters were there in response to several incidents of hate crimes that had been prominently featured in the news over the past year. Their anger was focused on the law authorities’ role in some of the events, as well as the authorities’ response to those events. The authorities were perceived by many as not taking a hard enough stance on hate-related issues. Interestingly, according to the latest FBI figures released in 2005, reported hate crimes were at their lowest in 10 years, and according to the Justice Department, successful prosecutions for civil liberties set a new record in 2007, but whether or not these figures paint an accurate picture of hate crime trends, the public attention is now more strongly focused on hate, and the need to respond equally with hate. This is what happens when we allow our emotions to become engaged in where we put our attention; we get hooked into being players in the drama. By allowing themselves to get caught up in strong emotions about a situation, these people become hooked into focusing on what they don’t want instead of what they do want.

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