HATE is a four-letter word.

[Sparkly]

LOVE is the four-letter word I grew up learning to embrace! "God is Love," I was taught at church. "Love" was everywhere as a pacifist, anti-war sentiment. I think I so believed that "love was the answer," I didn't understand that other people could be hurtful. Believe it or not, my parents never told me that.

It was only when I empathized with the experiences of Black friends, gay friends, and a close relative who was raped at a very young age that I realized HATE was within me, too. For all my pacifism and spiritual idealism, I've asked myself since I was still a teenager: if I were given the opportunity to stand before that rapist while he was bound to a chair and I had a loaded gun, would I use it?

HATE is what I feel toward every MAGAT, just as I've been demonized. At the same time, I don't want to feed into their design for a civil war - and somehow, this division works for them. That includes our hatred of their hatred...

I'm not sure the answer to this divide will be turning the other cheek so much as showing them the mirror, and their own families across the divide.