On Friday, the agents of intolerance took more than 120 innocent lives in the name of their goal: Division. Fear. Hate. A black-and-white world with their idea of right on one side, and everything else on the other — a land of sinners and rogues and wrongdoers, into which they can run their indiscriminately murderous sorties forever in the name of their own doomed cause.
Doomed? Of course. The world will never be the way they say they want it to be, which is really what the agents of intolerance want, because when you run on hate, who wants a world in which there's nothing left to hate on? The journey is its own reward, and so on.
The agents of intolerance believe that Friday's crimes were a victory, because they sowed fear. But fear isn't the real endgame; hate is. Hate is fear gone fully, finally rancid in the absence of hope. Courage is fear overcome, and fear is required for both.
We saw some hate in the wake of Friday's crimes. But we saw a hell of lot more unity, and courage, and love. For every bigoted, fearmongering Facebook post, there were a thousand messages of support. And the cynics can call it a passing, insubstantial thing — these reblogs, these Likes, these memes and tweets and words and prayers — but all weekend, they drowned out the cries for bigger walls, for more guns, for more fear of the foreign, the different, the far-off unknown. They comforted, and inspired, and reaffirmed that there is always, always hope.
Over the weekend, there was loss, and heartbreak, and grief on a global scale. And there was, and will be, fear.
But hate?
Over the weekend, hate failed.
This article appears in Nov 12-18, 2015.