By Ann Woodford, Guest Columnist
Any kind of hate leads to another kind.
A Jewish statement says, “Hatred stirs up strife, but love covers up all faults.”
Jesus Christ said, “Love one another.”
Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha said, “The tongue, like a sharp knife … kills without drawing blood.”
Hindus say, “God is love.”
A Cherokee proverb states, “When you were born, you cried, and the world rejoiced. Live your life so that when you die, the world cries and you rejoice.”
Hatred and bigotry are like two large, poisonous snakes, circling each one of us, vying for our attention. We don’t know which one to watch out for because we know that at any time one could strike us.
We try to escape when they fight each other. We call out for friends and loved ones who jump into the circle to save us and become entrapped there with us. We cannot get away because sometimes the serpents are so beautiful that they mesmerize us with their hypnotizing undulations and colorful, bright reflections.
If we think, we know exactly what they are capable of. At times, they change directions, but they are always surrounding us, capturing our minds.
We begin to fight each other as we differ in our opinions about how to escape. We bet on which one will win when they entangle each other, and we begin to take sides against each other within the circle even as we hope we can find an opening in the vicious enclosure that starves us and takes away our ability to think straight about what could await us outside the circle. Fear traps us.
The massacre stirred by the fighting snakes poisons the air and kills our vision. It is possible that some of those outside the circle could save us, but we refuse to call out to them for help because we think they will take away something that we once believed belonged to us. Inside the circle, we continue to lose everything.
What will become of us as the vipers continue to encircle us, burning up our minds, starving our dreams, and deleting our hopes?
Our children become deadly enemies of themselves as they do everything to dull their minds and freeze their hearts with their ever-moving thumbs, intoxicated eyes staring straight ahead. And we follow suit, never seeing who sits next to us, instead of reaching out and using our creative minds. We lose our ability to encourage each other and connect with the young people, some of whom may have the answers to our escape.
We still have a voice that we could use to call out to those outside the circle, but we are not sure who they are, and what they may do to us since their world is quite different from ours.
We are very much like the folks in the parable about a group of folks sitting around a large pot of hot, tasty soup, each holding a long-handled spoon that makes it impossible to feed themselves. We sit and starve while we watch the soup boil down, eventually dry up, and burn before our eyes when all we would have had to do is feed each other with our long-handled spoons.
In 2023, I hope we can make new friends or renew old relationships as a Chinese proverb says: “Friendship outlives adversity.”
Let us feed one another with love.
A resident of Andrews, Ann Miller Woodford is an award-winning historian, activist, author and artist.