You may have heard the phrase: “People are hard to hate close up.”
Create a free account to read this article
or signup to continue reading
It’s been popularised recently by American professor Dr Brené Brown, and with good reason: it’s true.
The act of engaging with your enemy can defuse the kind of hatred that only works if you allow yourself to believe that your foe isn’t quite human.
Speaking with someone, eating with them, meeting their children; it changes everything.
I thought of it when I saw that snatch of video doing the rounds this week following the Pittsburgh synagogue bombing.
In it, a leader of the city’s Muslim community announces that they’ve raised $70,000 to help the attack victims and their families.
Then he pledges protection for them, even if it’s just to make them feel safe when they go out and buy groceries.
The Arab and Jewish hatred is perhaps one of the most entrenched in the world, spanning millennia.
I’ve lived in the Middle East and seen where pages have been removed from my child’s history textbook, the ones about the Holocaust (it didn’t happen, apparently). And I also have friends whose families (Muslim and Christian) were turfed from their homes and land in Palestine, never to return.
It seems intractable.
Yet, in places like Pittsburgh, old enemies can become neighbours.
They can go to school together, work with each other, play on the same sport teams, allow themselves to get “up close” to each other.
It works on a one-to-one level too. The more you know someone, the more you understand why they may have wronged you.
But what about those we’ll never get a chance to get up close to?
Would it be madness to suggest that the more you do it in your own world, even your own home, the more likely you are to be able to extend kindness to people ‘out there’?
Like another wise, Middle Eastern man suggested, loving your neighbour is good, but loving your enemies can change the world.
