Love – affection based on admiration, benevolence, or common interests; warm attachment, enthusiasm, or devotion
Hatred – extreme dislike or disgust
Wading into what is happening before yours and my eyes is at the same time an exploration of our minds; what we witness, how we process what we witness, how we act on it. In these accelerated times wherein access to events happens not in weeks or days as in the old newspapers, or that night as with television news, but now in moments through an interconnected world, we are confronted with processing events instantly. It would be easy to say this is a collective pursuit but given the repeated phenomena of us all looking at the same input but having different conclusions demonstrates that there is no collective.
Should our thoughts be collective?
Absolutely not.
How can two minds see or experience the same event and leave with different conclusions? If you love someone, they can do no wrong, and if you hate someone, they can do no right. For example, all of my life every black activist whether educated or amateur has insisted that the black community was deliberately flooded with narcotics by the US Government to subvert the upward evolution of the African American. The crack-cocaine epidemic that roared through inner-city neighborhoods wreaked havoc on black society, destroying lives, families, institutions, and neighborhoods was a plot by white supremacists to keep black people down. So…we’re all in agreement that “drugs are bad, especially for black folks”—right?
We’re celebrating the destruction of drug smugglers…right?
Or maybe not…
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?mibextid=wwXIfr&v=760606910090340&rdid=EzwesNeOrKUNphgi
You would think that the community most acutely affected by narcotics would celebrate this, but…black people HATE Donald Trump, so he can do no right. He must be up to something and denouncing him is more important. When I saw that missile (which US Coast Guard ships do not carry, requiring offensive capability) hit the drug smuggling speedboat, I cheered. But not Negroes. The Negro cannot celebrate this; there must be a conspiracy afoot. The person who sent this to me did not consult me first, because he hates Donald Trump, white people, the United States, and possibly the military, and thus can we do no right.
Thus, we have black politicians and activists and everyday African Americans launching themselves in suicide dives at the President and any member of the administration, killing themselves in maniacal kamikaze attacks on Donald Trump and Republicans, suicide attacks on law enforcement, and general hatred for the system that they live off of. This week they were successful, eliminating Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA. But his killer is still a suicide pilot, because he’s going to get the death penalty or equivalent.
“All politics is local,” as the expression goes, so why are they entering these death dives when their first concern should be there districts? Atlanta has a soaring gang problem, but Fani Willis dedicates herself to prosecuting the President, failed, and now herself is under legal scrutiny. New York has a crime problem that his hurting ‘black and brown’ people, and Letitia James climbed into a Kamikaze plane on a one-way mission to take down Trump, and now herself is facing charges. 
Chicago has been bad for decades, so violent that Spike Lee made a movie titled “Chi-Raq”, (A blend of Chicago and Iraq) about the extreme violence, but every night on the news Mayor Brandon Johnson and Governor J.B. Pritzker are arguing with the president that things are normal or “getting better”. In these places, local needs are second as their constituents suffer to uphold the Democrats national agenda-defeating Trump.
It’s not just black people. The young Ukrainian woman stabbed to death on the train in Charlotte had a Black Live Matter poster on her bedroom wall–the photo is hard to locate on the internet, but if its real, talk about irony. Female Muslim Politicians such as Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib who rage against President Trump and America, despite knowing full well that in the Islamic World there are NO female heads of state, and few female politicians, yet these women are mad at us. What about the young white progressives who are embracing socialism despite the hundred-year long stream of central and eastern Europeans who fled socialist countries (some died trying to escape, see the Berlin wall). But this is all to rebel against President Trump and Republicans (whom they hate), embracing a form of government that consistently results in societal failure. Even more perplexing is the New York City gay community’s endorsement of Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani—a Muslim socialist whose religion in some countries condemns gays to death. Are you cutting off your nose to spite your face? Do I need to bring up Jewish support from Bernie Sanders and Chuck Shumer?!?
Back to Chicago for a moment: Chicago has had problems a long time, especially the 13th Legislative District in Chicago which was once represented by a young senator named Barack Obama. High crime before he came, while he was there, and after—what did he do to solve this? Half of Chicago’s black residents are from that district, yet they voted for him and democrats before and every election after to this day. And their constituents will vote to keep them office. Even as every week another black mother is on the news crying over the loss of a child to gang violence, they love people who “look like them” and then vote against their very survival because they hate Republicans, and love Democrats who give them free stuff. Because when people love you, you can do no wrong.
Law Enforcement agencies experience this. In the eyes of those of us on right, we love the police, so the police can do no wrong. Until they come to get OUR guns. Or they stand in the way of the January 6 protesters; now the police we celebrate are wrong, we call for the head of the officer that killed Asleigh Babbitt, the very same things that when the subject killed by the police is black we urge the county to “get all the facts first”. And when the subject is Black, African Americans will watch an eight-second clip, inciting emotions by insisting (screaming) it was unjustified, and arrogantly demand convictions despite not being in the jury room to hear the full story, because we (blacks) hate the police, they can do no right.
I too am sometimes guilty—if I hear a cross whisper about the US Military establishment, which I love, I will defend it vigorously, it can do no wrong (well I do have some complaints…), but you get the point. But I can get past my…hates…I hated Barack Obama, but the night he pulled the trigger that President Clinton pulled, that President Bush may have missed by engaging Iraq, and smoked Osama Bin Laden he earned my respect in matters of national security and strategic objectives. And he displayed no elements of street culture, which I also liked (but he did have a smooooth walk).
We may be culturally different, affecting what we love or hate – What one finds revolting and opaque, another sees as perfectly acceptable and passable. A joke to one is an unforgivable offense to another. Back in my Army days as a young Soldier, I complained to my unit’s First Sergeant about the shower and latrine habits of my peers, and he tempered me with this: “Sergeant Queen, what you or I find out of place is perfectly normal to some people.” I carry that to this very day. Each person’s thoughts are fed through individual prisms; and what comes out on the other side creates a spectrum of views and sometimes reactions, based on how our prisms are shaped.
I, like many black men, but not all, grew up in the roughness of the inner city, mine being a South Bronx housing project. Since the seventies, in those areas violence has become more extreme and violent death a sometimes weekly if not daily reality. In that environment, or culture, street violence is an acceptable (and preferred) method of problem solving. In a general sense, black people find street violence problematic but entertaining. Where other cultures may have had that outlook a hundred years ago and evolved, the African American still love/hates it. And while as a people we abhor it, if a non-black (=white) person points out that this tendency is killing us (literally), we push back because we love street culture and hate white people. Street culture can do no wrong when the critic is not from the streets, and the white person, white adjacent/wanna be–they can do no right.
But how do I, or you, handle that? Do we accept it, and march onward? Do we attempt to convince others to our views? Do we lower ourselves to their standard? Or is that thought arrogant, assuming we are elevated–and their standard is lower. The young man who assassinated Charlie Kirk imagines himself like Dr Dyson from Terminator 2, who along with Sarah Connor, and Schwarzenegger’s T-100, seek to destroy Skynet before Skynet destroys the world. Luigi Mangione is a hero to some because they hate the health insurance business and have been taught to love progressivism and socialism. So, Luigi and Kirk’s killer Tyler Robinson can do no wrong, Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA and Brian Johnson of United Healthcare can do no right.
The question is, who do you love, who do you hate, and are you willing to admit it?
