Wednesday, April 2, 2014

An Open Letter to Haters Who Choose Violence

 I know who you are.  I have been dealing with people like you for many years, and I feel sorry for you.  I feel sorry for you because your cowardice prevents you from knowing who you truly are.

You are children of a loving god and of a universe vast and rich with diversity.  How dare you act in a way that is so contrary to who you were born to be?

You were born with the gift of reason, yet you smash reason in the face every time you lash out with hatred and anger, simply because you are too cowardly to face someone different as an equal.

You were born with an innate awe and appreciation of the beauty in diversity, yet you find awe to be too much for you to handle.  Instead, you turn your back on awe and wonder and beauty and you embrace fear and emptiness within your soul.  I pity you because where beauty used to thrive within you, you have eagerly gathered a sticky tarred darkness, refusing to see the world around you with a sacred sense of wonder and divine beauty.  

I pity you because you have so embraced corruption that you refuse to see the divine spark within yourself.  You have turned your back on yourself and on the world around you because you can't handle being the awesome creature you were born to be.  You fear that awesome being that you were born to be.

You were born with an unlimited capacity for compassion and unconditional love, yet you traded away those divine treasures, finding the human burden of them too frightening, too difficult to bear.  You ran away from your birthright into the arms of cowardice, cobbled willingly to the much heavier burdens of fear and hate.

Hate like yours is really just fear taken to an extreme. It isn't the healthy fear that keeps us alert to real danger. No, hate like yours is the fear untempered by reason. You have transformed your fear into a nightmarish terror of everything within you and everything around you.  Hate like yours is the kind of fear that is also called cowardice because you always allow the fear to win over everything else.  You give in to your terror without allowing your higher self help you face it with courage.  Hate is just cowardice disguised as hate.

And yet you, like everyone else that you so fear, are a child of the divine.  You are still in there somewhere deep beneath the tar and muck of your unreasonable fear and ugliness.  Until you can recognize your true strength and begin to free yourself from your self-imposed trappings, I will pity you, but I will not fear you. 

I know who I am.  I am a child of a divine loving universe and I will not choose to hate you back, or fear you, for I know who you are.  You, too are a divine child of god.  I know that you are afraid of me and others who don't think like you, who don't walk, talk or look like you.  You are afraid of those who seem different from you because you are afraid of the light and sacredness within your own soul.  I pity you for your chosen path of isolation, destruction and self-hate, but I will NOT adopt your cowardice as my own.

Your fists and guns may harm or kill this body I inhabit, but the divine light of the universe will continue, and my memory and compassion with it.

I am not the person you beat or killed yesterday or last week or last year, but I feel each blow, each kick, stab or shot as if it were me.  It could be me, at any moment that you choose cowardice over your true divine self.

By Salomé HawkSong
April 2, 2014

Dedicated to those who have suffered at the hands of cowards who choose to commit hate crimes

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