Words Of An Idle Mind

The Hate We Give

We are living in a world of hate.

From racism to religious bullying, from sexism to sexual discrimination,
from expressing power to being powerful, from being powerless to victimization; we live in a world where hate fuels more energy than the non-renewable resources we ought to conserve.

We believe it has become our right to express hate and let others know that we hate them, their views, their ideology, their speech, their attire, their culture, their country, their EXISTENCE!

But, why? Why have we arrived at this? Why do we begin our day by releasing a hate speech towards an unknown identity on the internet, or someone that is separated by a screen? Why is that this hate, this united hate against someone brings people together? Where is this coming from?

I'm not a profound thinker to answer all these questions in any justifiable manner. But I certainly am a deep learner, who would love to try and unearth the emotions, the feelings, the mentality that drives this hate.

We start by sharing memes that may subtly insult someone. We see a video that maybe outrageous, or not aligned to our views and share it with explicit comments stating if we are for or against it. We laugh at someone's body, we criticize someone's way of living, we envy someone's life.

We do all this, but we never discuss.
We never ask any questions.
We just pass assertive statements, that have a potential to morph into judgements. It's an outlet for us, but an outlet that the person receiving it doesn't deserve (most of the time).

Instead of dealing with the problems in our real life, where we can make a difference, we choose to ignore it and subconsciously it guilts us into believing we are not enough, that we don't do enough. And since it's easier to condemn others than looking inside, we do precisely that. We tranfer our energies from self-reflection to having a hooded critical eye for everything someone else does. It releaves us. It temporarily elevates us. We saw someone do this, felt it was effective from a third person perspective, and applied it in our life. But doing it once wasn't enough, because  it didn't make you feel better deep down. So you tried it again, and agian and...

The hate that we give is the hate we never had, but we learnt. And if we can learn hate, we can definitely unlearn it. We can pause and take a step back to question if the hate is rightfully directed, or is it even hate that we want to propogate, or just simply disagreement.

Pause. Reflect. Take a step back. Two if needed. Unlearn.

.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.

A/N: This piece is a summary of my sentiments on a wide range of social issues that I've come across in today's time on my social media. Some of them are revolutionary - Black Lives Matter, CAA/NRC protests; while some are simply thoughts - Divyangna Tripathi's 'I'm not a feminist'. These are just the few that come to mind as I'm writing this, but there are many many more, that have consciously and subconsciously affected my life directly and indirectly.

What are your thoughts about the hate we see on social media?