3 seeds of hatred raise your spirit down so low  -prose

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You know I like you and I understand how you feel. But you also know my philosophy well. First, I take offense personally at "And the whites hate us". No I don't! I know a lot of whites do, I write about it all the time. I just do not accept the "all" label any more than you do. It is a label that breeds hatred. "All" of "us" do note hate you, and some of us even do everything we can to stomp hatred out like a burning cigarette butt someone flicked to the ground.  
 
"We are cultured and proud" is the problem. Everyone is cultured proud and pride IS a seeds of hatred. I know you understand this as well or perhaps better than anyone who has ever read 3 Seeds. I will shout from the mountain tops that we must destroy pride, we must wipe it from our hearts. So long as pride infects anyone, everyone is lowered by it's deceitful impersonation of self-esteem.  
 
Everyone must stop nurturing this diseased beast.
When it no longer matters what percentage of melanin is in our skin, then we can start to let go of hatred, let go of pride and see each other as brothers and sisters in human kind. Maybe that's wishful thinking, but I wish it anyway. Martin had a dream and he infected my soul with it. I will not stop screaming as loudly as I can that pride is a monstrous child. I have witnessed it from it's smallest sprout to it's national patriotism. To love anything at the detriment of another can lead down one path, the path that becomes hatred. It never seems like a big deal until it grows so large it can no longer be ignored. Consider the class hatred that has finally burst all over the world. I have seen this coming for a long, long time. 99% hate 1 %. 1 % hate 99% and it has brought us to physical confrontation in the streets.  
 
We have had the ability to do something about this all along, but no one does anything until it gets to a boiling point. It's like everything else, don't fix the environment until it starts killing us, don't end wars until we are sick of killing each other. There is nothing so lazy as a human who will not speak out. So now, people decide to speak out? When poverty starts to creep up on the middle class and they finally come to realize what the filthy stinking rich have been doing to them all along, they decide it's time to exercize there jaws for something other than consuming.  
 
The hatred you experience because you are not pure in the eyes of those who decide the shade of your skin is your I.D. card into their special society are no different than those who decide you can't drink out of their water fountain or sit in the front of the bus or enslave you because of the color of your skin or because you are a woman and they want a sex slave or any other form of discrimination or method of control. I am white and I am burdened by the history of my country, so I speak out when I see others casting the shroud of that burden back onto my shoulders.  
 
I do not hate, therefore not all whites hate! Am I the only one? Am I the only white person, or the only human at all that has eyes to see through the melonin? I feel alone, I feel so alone is makes my heart want to stop beating. And it makes my heart cry to see that after all the horrors that hatred has done, all the lynchings, the scalpings, the ovens and the wars that the same minds that have created such beautiful music, works of art, poetry from the soul and love, love that I have been denied and yet still can reject this beast, how is it possible that people still cling to pride, still steal from the poor to increase their own wealth, still create fear in others to control them? How is it possible?  
 
I could apologize for ranting in your library, but how can I not do what my heart tells me to do. It is bursting from my soul, hatred must die and the first step to killing it is to let go of pride, greed and fear. God didn't need to make an angel who fell to tempt us through the gates of Hell, he put the deamon right inside us and the only exorcism that can drive him out is love.
JJ
 
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This is the crux of what I was trying to explain. I am saying that we should not be proud. No one should be proud. I do understand, but I understand it from another view. I understand from being part of a white society that hates. I have seen it from the haters point of view. I have had so many experiences I cannot describe them, but for every moment of hate I have witnessed placed on someone not white, I have been sickened. I will tell you of one that best describes what I have seen first hand. A former manager at a store I worked in was the granddaughter of a Nazi, a real Nazi, not one of these American Neo-Nazi's, a actual German Nazi murderer. Ya know why I know that? Because she felt comfortable telling me all about how proud she was of her grandfather, about how she treasures his war medals and uniforms that she adorns the walls of her home with. And guess why she felt so comfortable telling me that... Well, not simply because I am white, but because I have German blood in my veins.    
  
But it didn't end there, she decided to introduce me to the music of the fatherland and openly talk about how much she hated blacks, using the N word regularly, and how much she hated Jews and Mexicans and Native Americans and how she was part of this organization that feels the same as her. She was hoping I would join them, instead I wrote her a poem. I would tell you the name, but apparently that would be promoting my poems. I was not trying to promote my poem, I was making the point that I write about hatred a lot, and I know you are familiar with that poem. I don't know if you have read the others, but lets say there are plenty of them in my library. I want people to read them, yes, but not as a promotion, as a vehicle to expose others to what hatred is. Conceit and arrogance are children of pride and this is why I have to challenge you on this. Because I care about you, I cannot be silent. Silence is like sunshine to the seed. Every garden needs sunshine, but you have to weed the garden. That is my philosophy, my heart. I believe it to the core of my being. When you say you are offended by what I said, I feel I must respond in opposition because you are clinging to the very thing that others cling to when they hate you. My ex boss is but one person who has displayed their hatred deliberately in front of me expecting me to embrace them and their hatred. I will not. She refused to hire blacks because she claimed they would just steal from the register. She is not the only boss I have had that has said exactly the same thing. These are people that I had otherwise liked up to that point, but after found I could not stand being in the same space with.  
  
  What can I do but speak against that sort of thing. That Christmas season we needed another sales person to take on the extra customers, so the District Manager  sent one from another store. Well guess what... He was black! HA! I said to myself, now she has no choice but to work with a black guy. It was like a slap in the face to hatred as far as I was concerned, better than my poem to her. So you know what she did? She hid in the office for the entire month. Unbelievable, she wouldn't come out even when we were swamped with customers. She sat their fuming mad at her desk from Thanksgiving to New Year's Day and and after all was said and done, we lost so many sales because of her hatred that she nearly got fired by the District Manager who was not only the guy who transferred a black man to help us, but was her boyfriend. Now, if that's not justice, I don't know what is. But the whole point is, I have had doors opened to me because it was expected I would just join the party and add some more hatred to the soup. In fact it made me quit these jobs because i could not stand the stench of hatred. It has surrounded me for as long as I can remember and I have lost friends because I will not tolerate it.    
  
I see it from a different point of view as you, but if the only people who can speak against hatred are those who have had a lifetime of it aimed at them, then it will surely never end. I must be as equally able to speak against it as you or the times when you speak about it will enter no more ears than those of the choir you add your voice to. And although I do not have a lifetime of prejudice to draw from, I have been discriminated against. I was fired from a job in a Jewish Deli because a customer was offended that I was making their food when I was not Jewish, in spite of much praise from other customers and co-workers. My boss even told me how happy he was with the work I had done, but in the very next breath told me that I wasn't a good fit and he had to let me go. A part of me was pissed off, but I also understood the politics of pleasing the customer base. It would only have gotten worse, the woman who hated the idea of a non-Jew from making her breakfast would very likely spread that to others. Had I not been so young, I might have made a big stink about it. I might have caused a scene, as I surely would do so now. I decided to be silent and I think it was wrong for me to be silent. Age has a way of letting go of the fear over raising ones voice. Now I cannot be silent, especially when I see someone I care about echoing the mantra. It may seem small now, it may seem that using the word "all" was a simple thing to edit, but it is a seed. You can't cover the seed, it grows through the mound of dirt that covers it. I see the seed in you, and if it means that you will hate me for pointing it out, then I have to be courageous enough to risk losing your friendship. Before it becomes a beast within you, I owe it to you to shed a light that I hope can burn away the pride and allow you to see it for what it is.    
  
Before I first began to see pride for what it really is, I nearly lost my brother to this very same issue. He was a devotee of a Hindu Guru who had convinced him of the evils of pride. We had an argument that infuriated me so much I wouldn't speak to my brother for weeks. I told him he was wrong, that pride was a good thing. I explained that pride inspired people to achieve great things, and I believed it wholeheartedly. But after that argument, I couldn't get it out of my head. I thought about it day and night for weeks until I started to understand it. I wasn't completely convinced, but I was opening my mind to an idea that stated a firestorm in my heart. Then one day I stopped in a bookstore and saw a book on the shelf. It was a book of speeches by Martin Luther King Jr. King had always been someone I admired, but I had really only read a handful of his most famous speeches. I picked the book up and it opened to a speech that changed my life.    
  
The moment I started reading, I could not put it down. The words were singing to my soul. I was standing there in the bookstore crying. I could hardly read the words through the tears. People were looking at me, probably thought I was crazy. I didn't have enough money to buy it that day, so I had to finish reading no matter what they thought. It was King's sermon, "The Drum Major Instinct". It answered the questions I had running through my head since the argument with my brother. But it also answered many other questions I had in life. I was able to finally see what my brother had been telling me that day. I was able to finish writing 3 Seeds. So please pardon my promoting a poem that sings the song of my soul. It's here for free. I won't get paid for anyone reading it. I am not going to get a prize for it. It is not the poem I am promoting, it is an idea I want to plant in the hearts of everyone, to offset what has already been planted there and is growing where no gardener bothers to look because the flowers have never been as pretty as the part of the garden everyone can see.    
If you are going to be offended by me, then let it be for trying to open your eyes as mine were opened. Don't read my poems, read "The Drum Major Instinct". In MLK I cannot be made to feel shame for promoting his artistic masterpiece.    
  
I don't believe I veered off topic, the topic of hatred has many paths that all lead outward from the heart. I want only to discover one that I can follow back in and plant a new seed inside. You may not want it, you may reject it, you may even hate me for it, but I won't be silent and turn my back on you. It is not enough for me to voice displeasure over the word "all". Using the word "all" was not the real problem, the problem is what inspired the word, and what makes you feel that all white people hate you. Maybe most do, maybe all but one hates you, but it is my hope that you can find a way to change the hearts of those who do hate you.    
Your poem brings to light an aspect of hatred you have had to endure and it is right for you to bring it out and tell others about it. But casting even one stone of blame at a hater will inspire retaliation for causing more pain. It's like trying to get someone to submit by choking them. They only stop struggling because they want you to stop choking them, not because they realize you were right. And they walk away with more hate than they had when they did whatever hateful thing they did to you. There are examples enough in human history and here we are some 40,000 years after the first works of art created by human hands, still hating and loving to hate without enough poetry to wash it from our skin, let alone our hearts.  
jj