(...) The connecting line between addiction and hate, according to Maté, is trauma. "What happened in Pittsburgh is a manifestation of trauma," Maté told the Inquirer. "There is no mass killer who wasn't a traumatized person."

Trauma is not foreign to Maté. He was born in Budapest to Jewish parents a month before the Nazi occupation of Hungary in 1944. His grandparents were killed in Auschwitz and his father was sent to forced labor. For his safety, his mother decided to give him to a Christian stranger. They were separated for a few weeks. Family members were eventually reunited and made their way to Canada. He became a physician, treating people in addiction on the eastside of downtown Vancouver, the drug-use capital of North America. During this time, he was a workaholic, depressed, and addicted to purchasing classical-music CDs, once spending as much as $8,000 on music in one week.

Just like addiction — to drugs or classic music — provides relief to people who were traumatized as children, so does hate.

People like the shooter from Pittsburgh have, according to Maté, "anger (that) has got nothing to do with what they think they are angry about. They are just angry because of what life has done to them as children and then they find external targets." Politics plays a role, too. "It will give them a target and an explanation to their rage and an outlet to express their rage," and "adds more and more fuel to direct their violence toward certain groups," he says. (...)

W.J. Astore

Who are we supposed to hate today?  The Russians for allegedly throwing the presidential election?  The Chinese for allegedly stealing our jobs?  The North Koreans for allegedly planning our nuclear destruction?  The Iranians for allegedly working to acquire nuclear weapons?  The “axis of evil” for being, well, evil?

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously told Americans that the only thing they had to fear is fear itself.  However, recent American presidents have encouraged us to fear everything.  Let’s not forget the stoking of fear by people like Condoleezza Rice and her image of a smoking gun morphing into a nuclear mushroom cloud.  That image helped to propel America into a disastrous war in Iraq in 2003 that festers still.

One of the most powerful scenes I’ve seen in any movie came in the adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984.  The film version begins with the “two minutes of hate” directed against various (imagined) enemies.  Check it out.  Doubleplusgood!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KeX5OZr0A4

Especially disturbing is the rant against Goldstein, the enemy within.  Here I think of Donald Trump claiming that the Democrats are anti-military for not rubberstamping his budget, a dishonest as well as ridiculous charge, since both parties support high military spending.  Indeed, high Pentagon spending is the one bipartisan area of agreement in Congress.

The top tweet is typical of Trump: Accusing Democrats of not caring about “our” troops

This is among the biggest problems in America today: the stoking of hate against the enemy within, e.g. “illegal” immigrants (rapists, gang members, killers, according to our president), Democrats who allegedly don’t support our military, rival politicians who should be “locked up,” protesters who should be punched and kicked and otherwise silenced, high school students who are dismissed as phonies and professional actors, and on and on.

Irrational fear is nothing new to America, of course.  Consider the fear of communism that produced red scares after World Wars I and II.  Consider how fears of the spread of communism led to criminal intervention in Southeast Asia and the death of millions of people there.  Massive bombing, free-fire artillery zones, the profligate use of defoliants like Agent Orange, the prolongation of war without any regard for the suffering of peoples in SE Asia: that behavior constituted a crime of murderous intensity that was in part driven by hatred and fear.

And when hatred and fear are linked to tribalism and a xenophobic form of patriotism, murderous war becomes almost a certainty.  When the zealots of hate are screaming for blood, it’s very hard to hear appeals for peace based on compassion and reason.

Anger, fear, aggression: that way leads to the dark side, as Yoda, that Jedi master, warned us.  Hate too, Yoda says, must be resisted, lest one be consumed by it.  Sure, he’s just an imaginary character in the “Star Wars” universe, but that doesn’t negate the truth of his message.

God is love, the Christian religion says.  Why then are we so open to hate and fear?

Thank you for this, Meowie.

This "History Repeating" song sure has a lot of impact today.

I woke up this morning looking for someone to blame. Someone to hate. Someone who I could make the single target of my fear about the officers killed in Dallas and what happened to Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. It was such a desperate feeling to want to discharge the uncertainty and scarcity. Then it dawned on me that this is the exact drive that fueled what's happening right now.

Instead of feeling hurt we act out our hurt. Rather than acknowledging our pain, we inflict it on others. Neither hate nor blame will lead to the justice and peace that we all want - it will only move us further apart. But we can't forget that hate and blame are seductive. Anger is easier than grief. Blame is easier than real accountability. When we choose instant relief in the form of rage, we're in many ways choosing permanent grief for the world.

Brene Brown

This is pretty close to how I'm feeling. Exactly how I woke up feeling today. Ive been crying all morning and couldn't really put my finger on why. I think I've been so angry lately about all the hate and it was fueling my own hatred of people who think differently from me and who I blame for the current state of affairs. The truth is, under that hate was/is incredible sadness. My hate broke this morning, when I heard about all of the police who continued to do their jobs as shots were being fired at them. The sadness and hopelessness and helplessness was all that was left.