In a world full of ugliness and hate I think it’s important to look at the root of the problem, rather than simply pointing the finger outward. If we want things to get better, we need to see things clearly. No person is your enemy. Follow me.
I believe that racism exists, I don’t believe that racists exist. I believe that hate exists, I don’t believe that hateful people exist. There’s an important distinction to be made here. We have to look at all human beings from a place of basic goodness. Just as we are basically good (even if we forget), so is every other person. It’s highly likely that you are the bad guy in someone else’s story, just as you have made others the bad guy in your own story. But this is missing the point: man is not our enemy. We are not each other’s enemies. The hate and fear that cause us to act against our own basic goodness: that’s the fucking enemy. And it’s all illusion.
Hate and fear thrive on division and separation. So the more we see people as other than ourselves, the more hate and fear thrive. This is the breeding ground for racism, bigotry, and violence. When we see that the person behaving in a hateful way is not inherently a hateful being, we can start moving in the right direction. They are basically good, just as you are basically good. We must forgive others, we must forgive ourselves and we must remember that no matter what kind of fucked up shit people do, it’s nothing personal. They are just caught up in the illusion of fear and hate, just as we have been caught up in the same illusion. We will surely be caught there again, so it behooves us to stop fueling the fire when and where we can. We must see others as our brothers and sisters. We must see them, and ourselves, as basically good.
This is great, dude. There are some similar lines of reasoning I recall from my spiritual teacher. In “Call Me by My True Names”, Thich Nhat Hanh wrote, “I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate,
and I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving.“ he was considering, I think, intervening and how we are all one in this cosmos. But I think the way closes the stanza backs what you’re saying, too. The idea that the pirate (and we) can develop the capacity to see and love — it’s in there. It’s in all of us. We just need to develop it.