This is how I wish the conversation would have ended …
There are the things that you see in the world that you just hate. We hate them because they are ugly – an ugly way for people to treat each other, ugly things to value given so many more beautiful options, and we hate them because they remind us of each of our own capacities to mistreat others, and our own capacities to value things that have no value over the things that mean so much, and we hate them because they remind us not only of our individually precarious positions, but how we teeter in our collective humanity. And we can feel this hatred in the bristle of our hair and the redness of our face, and the sting of bitten tongues. And I can feel the hatred when I look at the big buildings that are younger even than my life in Bloomington, in these big buildings that look so much like the jail next door. And I can feel this hatred in the brightness of the signs that seems to threaten to overpower the brightness of the stars so starkly visible from our backs in the graveyard a few blocks away.
But, really, we can feel this hatred in two ways. We can try to hate the things that we hate more than we already hate them, and we can hate and hate and hate with fury and with explosion and clenched fists and red faces. But, in the end, I don’t know where that leaves me.
Or, we can try to love the things that we love as much as we hate the things that we hate. We can try to love them more than the things that we hate, exponentially more than the things that we hate, orders of magnitude more than the things that we hate. And we can hope that this is enough.