Today was a day where the judgement of others was free flowing and by evening had reached maximum capacity. I had one of those moments where I just stopped and became genuinely overwhelmed by the fact I am raising my children in a society full of people that seem to bring attention to what they “hate” instead of promoting the things that bring them happiness. Insert brief moment where I begin to narrow down my thought…now, cue the realization that it’s not an entire society, it’s just a small, conservative town in the south. It is a place where I have lived less than 10 years of my adult life but also the place my three children consider “home.” I rationalize with myself on a weekly basis that bigots are everywhere. Then I allow myself to believe the truth, there is a concentrated population existing in my general vicinity.

Hear me when I say it is not hard to raise tolerant individuals. It goes a little something like this…from a very early age you teach children to be kind and accepting. The end. The problem is children are sponges and they are soaking up the “hate” from the adults around them. Those adults probably soaked it up as children from the adults around them.

Intolerance has become rampant. People excuse others intolerant behavior on a daily basis and they are rationalizing their “hate” using every excuse from ignorance to religion. Ignorance can only be remedied through education. Children are learning how to read, add and subtract, the state capitals and the periodic table but somehow so many are missing the important lesson of empathy. No one is teaching them to understand where another person is coming from and how to treat the concerns of others the way they would treat their own. On the religious front, I’m pretty sure Jesus would be disappointed in the amount of “hate” being spread around in his name. If I remember my lessons from Sunday school correctly, Jesus gave one and only one commandment. Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know you are my disciples, if you love one another. Maybe this explains why I have a hard time weeding through them myself. It’s hard to see the LOVE through all the HATE.

No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite. ~ Nelson Mandela