Why We Hate

You’ve got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You’ve got to be taught
From year to year,
It’s got to be drummed
In your dear little ear,
You’ve got to be carefully taught.

You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people Whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a different shade,
You’ve got to be carefully taught.

You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You’ve got to be carefully taught.

These are the lyrics to a song from Rogers and Hammerstein’s ”South Pacific”.

It is little known that the secondary plot of the show that introduced “Im Gonna Wash that Guy Right Out of My Hair and Bali Hai, caused a great deal of difficulty with its interracial romance between an American sailor and a Balinesian girl. The producers held fast and the show became an instant “forever” success on Broadway, in the movies and into musical history.

This lyric alone explains the reality of America’s past, present and perhaps, its future. Because no matter how we feel today, if we look closely into our past we “see and hear” examples of what the lessons about fear and hate have been and know where they came from.

Why did a wonderful Baptist Minister friend from the great soft coal fields of West Virginia so fear the potential Presidency of a Roman Catholic, John F. Kennedy?

Because he’d been taught that the Roman Pope would give orders to an American President. (Interestingly, Kennedy’s victory over Hubert Humphrey in Baptist West Virginia convinced the Democratic Party that America would vote for a Catholic for President. How JFK actually won that primary victory is a story all by itself)

Why did Mom throw away the dishes and utensils after our first Black friend had used them during lunch? Because her essential fear of blacks was so strong she found it too difficult to do otherwise.

Why did his Mother appear so cold and aloof when we visited his home? Because she felt he couldn’t and shouldn’t trust a white friend.

Why do the Police in so many American cities shoot unarmed black people.…just when you think those actions are forever damned? Because they grow up in a family of Police, especially in big cities, where attitudes- so often negative – are formed and carried from generation to generation.

Why does so much of white America continue to endlessly discriminate and incriminate those of color from all sources? Because attitudes in the family quietly but firmly, find their way into the body of thinking and feeling. They linger and last when everything else seems to be suggesting another, better way.

You’ve got to be carefully taught …repetition teaches best.

CHANGES, BUT SLOWLY

But little by little changes came to a country based on a brilliant but flawed Constitution which recognized those who were male with wealth and property and ignored everyone else.

Education helped. The GI Bill of Rights after WWII was the best piece of legislation ever written. Schools in the 1940s and 50s brought the best education America had ever experienced. And with education came awareness and understanding which began to work against so much of what we had been carefully taught.

In the 1960s Martin Luther King and brave men and women of African American descent, the children and grandchildren of slaves, came together to lead an effort to change the caste-bound attitudes of white America. And a very courageous President Lyndon B Johnson knowingly gave up the entire Democratic South to push through the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts to help us begin to desegregate a very restricted country.

And with it the Vietnam War where young people of all colors came together with strength, energy and purpose to protest a war they did not understand and would not support.

And they used college campuses throughout the nation as their platform to ask why and say No.

Changes were coming with education and awareness and joint efforts all across the board.

And in the midst of it came Barry Goldwater and then Ronald Reagan to gain power and control by playing upon the carefully taught and so deep-seated caste system and more, to turn the country from continuing to build a middle class to the capitalistic realty which is the economic heart of America – the power of money – who has it and what and who it can buy.

You’ve got to be carefully taught.

THE NEW ‘TEACHER’

It was not meant to be but we live now with the new teacher; the one that seemed so friendly and accommodating; the one so easy to access, to project ourselves, to be exposed to information, endless information…or endless opinions that seem to be information —

Social Media.

And what do we find: the ability of all those who hate to gather their ‘forces’ from all over the country – and the World – to propagate their own truths and disseminate them at will …sometimes identified, sometimes hidden.

And so comes the scourge of young people anonymously bullying others…sometimes so fiercely, so cruelly that lives are disrupted at best and suicides follow at worst.

And so comes the conspiracy theories of others…sometimes so obviously crazed that no one could possibly believe them. But this is no longer the country which educates its people as it once did…this is a country which has so closely followed the course of history: World powers lose their way when they stop educating their children and never regain those powers – NEVER.

And now that weaponized communications system becomes the new teacher and it is used by a group of people at the seat of power to provoke, cajole and support whatever particular hate or lie that exists in the minds of that power group.

And the United States of America – a group of States as close as countries in Europe – takes advantage of the regional differences that have always existed to divide itself not over a belief system or set of principles but the self-focused desires of one man who lies by nature and experience to make it seem as if America is out of control.

We hate because we are encouraged to hate.

We hate because there is jealousy and ignorance and avenues to exploit and enflame that hate.

Tell a lie and repeat it endlessly and people begin to believe it.

We are what we are: exposed now for all to see and if we choose –to join history’s failures or to be better.

We can work together – if we choose.

We can believe in each other – if we choose.

We can shut down the lying machine of social media – if we choose.

But most of all – we can overcome being carefully taught if we choose to work at making education important again and commit to the sacrifices and hard work necessary to make us the best educated country in the World –too smart to buy lies, too determined to become second class citizens to the rages of our economic system – to control it and not be controlled by it.

History says it has never been done. But history has never before known an America.