When I began to read Everyday Hate the current Nakba had not yet occurred and I was not particularly interested in Israel before that happened. I first encountered anti-Semitism in 1957 when I was fifteen, and saw the photos of mass graves in a magazine. This was a core awakening for me as I had never before imagined th…
When I began to read Everyday Hate the current Nakba had not yet occurred and I was not particularly interested in Israel before that happened. I first encountered anti-Semitism in 1957 when I was fifteen, and saw the photos of mass graves in a magazine. This was a core awakening for me as I had never before imagined that humans were capable of such evil. Around the same time I read Whitman's Leaves of Grass which was equally disturbing because I had never before encountered a mind with such depth of human sensitivity to beauty and lyrical openness to all beings. I have spent most of my life since then trying to understand how humans who are born with such a limitless potential for love and grace can be warped into engines of unlimited evil. I have been arrested for protesting against war and I once wore a yellow star in town. A woman asked me then if I was Jewish and I said "No, only on Remembrance Day." At this time of my life I have decided that the Human Problem stems from the abuse of our singular capacity for language and our long history of tribalism and authoritarian religion and politics that splits the world and our individual minds into good gods, good tribes, good selves and the hated Others. So I was attracted to Everyday Hate because I imagined it might be a forum for discussing the problen of hate and finding a better solution than hating the haters which is no solution at all and has been poisoning our species since we first began to speak.
Good morning Dave.
When I began to read Everyday Hate the current Nakba had not yet occurred and I was not particularly interested in Israel before that happened. I first encountered anti-Semitism in 1957 when I was fifteen, and saw the photos of mass graves in a magazine. This was a core awakening for me as I had never before imagined that humans were capable of such evil. Around the same time I read Whitman's Leaves of Grass which was equally disturbing because I had never before encountered a mind with such depth of human sensitivity to beauty and lyrical openness to all beings. I have spent most of my life since then trying to understand how humans who are born with such a limitless potential for love and grace can be warped into engines of unlimited evil. I have been arrested for protesting against war and I once wore a yellow star in town. A woman asked me then if I was Jewish and I said "No, only on Remembrance Day." At this time of my life I have decided that the Human Problem stems from the abuse of our singular capacity for language and our long history of tribalism and authoritarian religion and politics that splits the world and our individual minds into good gods, good tribes, good selves and the hated Others. So I was attracted to Everyday Hate because I imagined it might be a forum for discussing the problen of hate and finding a better solution than hating the haters which is no solution at all and has been poisoning our species since we first began to speak.