This generation especially are like an emotional marshmallow
hypersensitive to the mean negative words and actions of others
Because your entire life you have been taught a half truth.
The half truth is really a lie if it's not wholly taught.
And the half truth that you've been taught since you were in kindergarten are this:
Words hurt, words wound, words kill.
And if you go throughout life believing that
you are going to be emotionally fragile, volatile, overly sensitive.
If you believe words hurt, when someone's mean to you with their words you're like "you're hurting me"
if you believe words wound when someone's mean to you with their words you might be scarred for life.
And if you believe words kill, you may be like the growing sad number of students
who contemplate hurting themselves or hurting others in retaliation.
But throughout history, especially in this great country of the United States of America,
throughout history generations of moms and dads and educators and even grandparents
have been trying to teach their students "words don't have to hurt".
Words only have the power that you give them.
Man, if someone hates you, oh well, ain't no thing, it's all good.
You see, when you believe that you have a human right that everyone must be nice to you
you're setting yourself up for failure you're creating in yourself a victimization mentality.
Because when people are mean to you you say "you have no right!"
No, they do have a right. It may be immorally wrong but it is their Constitutional right.
In fact, the right we have in this nation is the right to free speech.
Even if it's mean. Even if it's hateful.
We live in a nation
It's cornerstone foundational philosophy is that every single citizen
has the right to stand up on their platform and speak their mind even if it offends another group.
And that's critically important.
Because if our government started to crack down on people's speech they would take over
and they wouldn't allow us to freely speak our mind.
You see, we think the answer to end hate speech is to crack down on speech and demand less speech
But the reality is: It's no. Let more speech happen
and may that speech be empowered by the virtue of love so that it can drowned out the vice of hate.
You've got to make a decision.
You've got to make a decision. I'm going to not give people power to hurt my feelings.
I'm not going to give people power to hurt my feelings
I'm going to expect people they're probably going to be mean.
And I'm going to let them be mean because it's a free country.
And I can't stop them from being mean.
But if they're mean no matter how they treat me I will always treat them the way I want to be treated.
And I want to be treated like a friend. But if they're treating me like an enemy,
I still want to be treated like a friend.
So I'm going to treat them the way I want to be treated (The Golden Rule).
Which means I'm going to treat them like a friend even if they're mean to me.
And that's what the golden rule means: "treat everyone like friends especially your enemy."
Treat everyone like friends especially your enemy. Why? Because when you treat your enemy like a friend...
(You don't have to be friends with them, you could be friendly to them)
and when you treat your enemy like a friend they have a hard time staying your enemy.
Dr. Martin Luther King put it this way, "You cannot drive out hate with more hate. Only love can do that."
Because love is greater than hate.
God bless you.
I love you.