I have been working on a poem for a few weeks now, motivated by a feeling that worries me: hate. Day after day the media bombard us with news of wars, assassinations, attacks and very serious accusations between our politicians, and in all of them hate seems to dominate everything. It is easy to realize that when it manages to settle in the heart of man, hatred blinds him, makes him a slave to his impulses and renders him incapable of thinking positively about others.
Hatred disguises itself as justice, but seeks revenge; it dresses up as self-defense, but wants to hurt us. Hatred makes us believe that it is a legitimate feeling with which we can make amends to those who offend us, threaten us or contradict us, but as soon as we allow it to settle inside us, it begins to devour our empathetic qualities, hardens our heart, clouds our reason and ends up making us justify the unjustifiable.
A few weeks ago the world witnessed the on-camera assassination of American activist Charlie Kirk. Although I personally do not share some of his ideas, I find it unacceptable that dissent becomes a justification for violence: no one deserves to die under bullets. It is paradoxical that in a world that works to ensure individual freedom and freedom of expression, differences of opinion end up leading to tragedies such as this murder. Kirk's death not only extinguished his voice, it showed how far hatred can take us: to irreparable destruction. Whether we like what a person stands for or not, no one has the right to sentence him or her.
The hater becomes a prisoner of his own anger, unable to find peace and to discover the beauty of others and of the world around him. The hater dehumanizes everything he perceives, and forgets that others are people like himself, owners of their own rights and freedoms. When a society is trapped in this poisonous circle, it builds walls that divide and end up killing with the same force of shrapnel.
Hatred does not necessarily germinate as a result of great tragedies, but grows little by little in everyday life: in the first words full of resentment, in indifference to the pain of others, in the prejudices with which we analyze our fellow men. That is why it must be stopped before it escalates to irreversibility.
I read my poem and understand that, more than a momentary inspiration, it is a call to conscience. If we allow hatred to guide our actions, we will be signing our own guilty sentence. That is why it is necessary for each one of us to stop and seek a moment of introspection to ask ourselves if we have allowed this deadly feeling to grow, even if it is a small root. We may not end up firing a gun, but resentment, anger and reckless judgments can come to rule us. That is why, in order to overcome it, it is necessary to do something as simple as recognizing the shadow that grows within us and deciding, with determination, not to feed it but to let love and empathy flourish.
