Posted June 5
When I was little, one of my sisters cried a lot. One day when I found her in tears, I tried to find out what had happened to her. Between two heartbreaking sobs, she said to me: “I’m crying because I like it! »
I was very annoyed because it meant that I wouldn’t be able to console her or even improve her situation a little. She took refuge in tears as others do in chocolate.
Why am I bringing up this memory?
For some time, I have had the unpleasant impression that many people allow themselves the expression of feelings that were once taboo in the public sphere. And even private if you consider that “you should kill yourself” is advice you don’t have to hear either publicly or privately.
I’m talking about the rage that explodes, the hatred that underlies it. I’m talking about all those anonymous lines that scream feelings that range from fierce annoyance to brutal intolerance through the desire to kill the opinion of the other if not to eliminate its author outright.
In what way, why have the events or behaviors of our fellow human beings suddenly become so unbearable? So aggressive that they stimulate such absolute reactions?
Yes, I know, the pandemic… These two years of a difficult experience for most people, this wrenching moment for those who lost their health or loved ones there, these two years would be partly responsible for the excesses of bile and of violence. I think she has a good back, COVID-19. While we have learned to protect ourselves and to protect the other, to consider him in his possible distress, his loneliness, he found himself looking at the other as an impediment, a form of coercion and even a condemnation. . The refusal of the other then began to reign. For some, it has become more venomous than the virus. But what’s the point of letting hate, rejection, at the slightest opportunity – I know, there’s no shortage of them? If at least it relieved! But it only gets exalted, amplified until it takes on disproportionate proportions. Violence feeds on itself more than on the subject that provokes it, violence is a cannibal that devours us before biting the other. Hate makes us ugly before dirtying its addressee. And you come to love the feeling of false power that comes from expressing that rage.
To be indignant, to revolt, to try to make the world better or slightly more human does not mean to knock out and voluptuously hate those who are considered responsible for these evils. What provokes the most valiant fights, the noblest battles, is not hatred, it is faith: to believe in something or someone and to try to convince by arguments and not by persisting in blows of judgments spiced with gall.
The rage or even the hatred that simmers in us, it is in our interest to eliminate it, to calm it. Because to begin to invective, to shout his contempt, it is only the expression of a helplessness.
To be subject to your inner rage is the opposite of being free. Sure, some days I’m pissed off… but giving in to him would feel so fruitless. Loving to cry did not dry up my sister’s tears and consoled her for nothing.
Loving to hate dries up and isolates. People who like to hate scare me because it’s the opposite of fighting, the opposite of opposing and struggling. Overwhelming with insults, showering the “adversary” with filthy words, middle fingers and wishes for destruction, that only allows one thing, cacophonous dissension. It drives away any form of thought or even sensible argument.
It was the theater man Bertold Brecht who said – and I quote from memory: “We know, however, that even the hatred of intolerance leads to intolerance. »
Obviously, he was right.
Hate, it seems dynamic, like that, on the spot, but it’s poison that we pour ourselves and drink hoping to kill the other.
My grown-up little sister doesn’t cry anymore, unless something really bad happens. His laugh makes me happy. And she laughs often.