One of the greatest blessings in my life are my friends. I get to spend my life with the kind of people who make a room brighter just by being there. The kind of people whose first response is always kindness and tolerance, who dream about doing brilliant things, who listen to the world and want to explore it. And being around these kind of people makes me want to be a better person, to deserve the love I receive from them and be able to try and return it.
Then the news is full of anger and violence and pain. Distorted people, blurring away from the cameras, fists in the air. We stand for ourselves. Not them. Out. An eye for an eye.
And they seem to think hate is good. One EDL member was asked on twitter what the difference between the neo-Nazi's, KKK and the EDL is (by and anti-EDL protester). His response:
"easy to prove [that the EDL are different from the other groups] ..the Kkk hate black people nazis hated the jews and the edl hate muslims.....the only connection is hate ...so"
The only connection is hate, he said. And that's okay, of course, because it's not the Jews. Not black people. And not white people either.
But I'm lucky. I was always loved and taught to love. Trying to be loving is easy. So I try to understand. Hate begets hate; people who are hurt lash back. I don't like the EDL or the BNP or UKIP. I hate what they stand for; everything about them repels me, and as a white British Christian I'd like to distance myself and everything I stand for from everything they claim to stand for, and the associations they make with white, British nationality, and even Christianity.
But it is tempting to hate them sometimes. To sneer. To slap back, violent protest against violent protest, swearword for swearword. I'm a guardian reading leftie; of course I'd like to shout at Farage or Griffin. I'd love to tell Tommy Robinson where he can stuff his Britain.
But we're trying to be better than that. And again I'm reminded how blessed I am. There's the Hope Not Hate movement, the mosque which opened its doors to the EDL, the good, sensible people who stand up to point out that extremists don't stand for the majority, who rebut mad nonsense with calmly-stated facts. A terrifying amount of people are trying to make hate the norm in this country - in this world - but more are responding with hope and peace. When the EDL protest, when the terrorists bomb towns or blow up cars, when rockets fly over walls instead of over our one planet, there are people who light candles, who pull children out of the wrecked buildings, who hold talks. John Green, in his video response to the Boston Bombings, called these people the helpers:
'If you look at those videos [the Boston bombing clips] you see two extraordinary things [...] all these flags lined up together, none higher than any other... those 96 flags of people running the Boston marathon are side by side because they stand for a larger us, an us sharing a human endeavour that doesn't require a 'them'. And the flags aren't blown over by the explosion, but within seconds some of those flags do come down. They come down when people, onlookers, first responders tear down the barricades to get to the injured. 'Look for the helpers', the great Mr Rogers said about tragedy, 'You will always find people who are helping.' [...] Think I'm cool living in a world with flags, but I am most proud to live in a world where no flag flies above any other. There are people who don't want to live in that world [...] but I know that we are not going to give it up. And I know that we can always look in hope to the helpers, and endeavour to be among them.'
John Green, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2X1gA5apcU, April 16th 2013
I don't think I can put it better than that.
J.R.
