2019 – National High School 4th Place

Sami Ahmed, New York.

Sami Ahmed

In today's society “hate” seems to have a greater impact than “love”. People around the world are living their lives solely by individual desire. Peoples actions and mindsets are being dictated by how they want to feel, but not how others want to feel. As soon as we exclude considering others feelings, we center our lives around selfishness, and thus evil and hatred. One can conclude that, most “hate crimes”, are based solely on something that someone or some group of people is against. This idea of “being against” shows hatred, and has a negative impact on society. People who are part of radical groups show their loyalty to their group by carrying out violent or oppressive activities. But overall, the sole purpose of creating “hate” groups that carry out “hate” crimes is to show hatred for something they feel is unjust. This is the case for most corruption in the world today. We tend to hate because we only care about ourselves, and believe that our individual feelings are superior to the rest.

The main reason why we choose to hate, is because we feel that something or someone has something we do not. We may even feel threatened, as if another person's presence will bring our status and ego down. Whatever the reason maybe, we always find ourselves hating rather than loving. As the absence of love continuously increases worldwide, so does the overall ignorance and selfishness of the general public. People tend to, "live in their own cocoons". This is dangerous since it is a seed that can grow into evil. We want what we want, and do not want others to have what we want. When someone has more, we hate. When someone feels a way that we want to feel, we hate. And thus we continue to be negligent to others ideas and only worry about ourselves.

This brings up the question: How can we hinder the spread of hatred throughout the world? In order to do so, we must use the hatred as a fuel to boost our pursuit for truth and excellence. No matter how we may feel towards something, we can keep it inside us, and use it to drive our minds to becoming more enlightened. The only condition is that we must learn to accept others’ ideas, and make them interact with hours. We must not immediately contradict and act offensively, otherwise we will continue to live our lives one-dimensionally. This means that people will stay unaware of their own ignorance, and have no desire to express themselves for what they believe and what they do not believe. As a result of this, hatred will spread.

Now it is up to us to stop hatred from spreading. We need to first identify what the determining factor is in so many aspects of our lives? The truth is, it is because of us being one-dimensional and living life through selfish desires. As the great Socrates once said, “from the deepest desires come the deadliest hate”. So our tendency to desire and love certain things in life also opens the door for us to hate. We may love things ourselves, but when we see other people go against our desires we begin to hate. Truth be told, there is a lot more hating going on than loving in this world. But, if we could just take into consideration other people’s perspectives, we can put an end to hate.

 

 

 

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