Erase Hate. Educate.

I was nine and my brother was three the first time my parents were asked, “Aren’t you afraid to leave your children with them?” referring to their gay best friends.

I was ten when our friend Greg was murdered, and his family was told by the state police, “He was gay. We’re going to just assume it was a ‘crime of passion.’ We’re afraid it’s not going to get a lot of attention.”

I was twelve my great aunt refused to come to our house anymore, for fear that she would contract AIDS.

I was sixteen, with my short burgundy hair and freedom rings (“Aren’t you afraid of what people will say?!”)  when I was told in the middle of my sociology class that all the gays should be put on an island and bombed. That the world would be a better place.

Shortly thereafter, the "gay plague" of AIDS took the first of our friends. His family didn't know he was sick because he had been afraid to tell them.

I was a first year teacher when I was told we needed to be afraid for Ryan, because kids were getting mean, and being not only gay, but a hemophiliac, if he got beat up, he could die.

I was an adult when my mother reminded me that we do not live in Boston or Burlington, when she apologized for encouraging me to be too liberal, too progressive, too bright and female and empowered, to work in the North Country and admit to my boss that I was in love with a woman. That that would be too much. She was afraid I would lose my job. 

I was an adult when I was asked by a closeted friend if I was afraid to walk down the street holding that woman’s hand.

It was this past spring that my wife’s parents sent her a letter, telling her that they were afraid they don’t know how to support her, through my cancer journey or really at all, because they fear she is an abomination and is going to burn in hell. 

It has been more than 25 years that I have sat with the fears of people coming out, staying hidden, praying for something different, because they were afraid of losing their friends, their families, their college funds, their faith, their safety, their lives. And I have always been afraid that I couldn’t do enough. 

I refuse to live a life of fear. We cannot live in fear.

In fear, our bodies and minds change. The way we see the world changes. We become primal. Are we going to flee, hiding from that which makes us afraid? Are we going to freeze, the proverbial deer stuck in the headlights, and do nothing? Are we going to flock, finding other people, similar people, with whom we can shelter from our fear, or are we going to fight that which we are afraid of?  From fear, we develop anger, from anger, hate. And from hate, all too often violence. 

But what if we refused to let fear control our lives and poison our hearts and minds? If we said enough of the fear and hatred bred of ignorance. If we decided to defeat violence, hatred, and anger back at their very roots.

In the words of Jonathan Larson, the opposite of war isn’t peace; it’s creation. Peace can be passive. Creation cannot. Similarly, I believe the opposite of hate isn’t love; it’s education. Active, concerted, meaningful, education. If we want the violence to stop, if we want our world to be a better place, if we want to start living with less fear in our hearts and our world, we must seek not only to tolerate, but to truly know, to empathize, to be educated in the lives of the people around us. To see them as we see ourselves. 

Life is too short, too precious, and too precarious to live in fear. As we come together in this space at this time when so many of us are left wondering, let us commit to not only filling the world with love, but understanding. Let us commit to educating ourselves and the world around us of the possibility of a world without fear. 

ERASE HATE. 

EDUCATE.

The opposite of war isn’t peace; it’s creation.

The opposite of hate isn’t love; it’s education.