Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about hate and its opposing force, love.  About anger and intolerance vs. kindness and peace.  I am pretty sure that I am not alone in these thoughts.  Thanks to our new President we now exist in a world where hate is center stage.   He has managed to lift up those people who espouse intolerance and division.  Even in my current, admittedly angry state of mind, I believe that these people are a minority of us.  But it doesn’t really matter because they have managed to infiltrate our minds and our daily life in a way that has not been seen for a long, long time.  It sickens me.  I admit that I have become a news junkie since the last election so I am watching this unfold minute by minute.  And it is astounding.

Of course hate has always existed.  We life in a free society where we are, thank God, able to express our views, mostly without repercussion, no matter how repulsive they may be.  Over most of my adult lifetime there have been brief sitings of the kind of hate and intolerance that now seem to be a daily occurrence.  It is ugly.  It is violent.  It is dirty.  It always has been.  But now it is staring us, if not slapping us, in the face.  Almost like something or someone is shouting “Wake up you idiots.  You thought we were beyond this kind of sickness.  Guess what?  It’s here.  It’s big.  And it now has confidence.”

In some strange way I feel like we should be a little grateful.  I think we may have been lulled to sleep for a while.  Particularly after having our first non-white President elected.  I honestly thought that President Obama’s victory was a sign that we had really evolved and that we had largely moved on from blatant discrimination.  Now I see that this is not true.  In fact, I think we are living in a country currently led by those who want to normalize discrimination and encourage hate.  I don’t want to believe this.  I really don’t.  But it becomes more difficult every day to avoid it.

Yesterday morning while running I had a conversation with a friend.  We discussed how disgusted we are about the state of our Country and its moral decline.  After a few rounds of bitching about it we agreed that all the anger and complaining in the world will change nothing.  It is high time to start acting and more importantly to be heard.  The worst feeling in the world would be to find yourself on the backside of a social disaster thinking:  “I wonder if I could have done something to prevent or alleviate it”.

I have always thought that “lone actors” rarely make significant change.  If you follow that thought to its natural end you find yourself doing nothing.  This is no longer acceptable to me.  I am choosing to focus on doing the right thing myself, regardless of how many people I might impact – or not.  Just imagine how powerful the many lone actors could be if they all did something – anything at all.  Add up the thousands, maybe millions of people who think that their actions alone won’t do anything about all this current hate.  Collectively, the sum of all those single actions could really make a difference.  It’s exciting when you let yourself imagine it.

Coincidentally, just this morning someone read a quote to me that only reinforced all this.  It went something like:  “There is a space within you between wishing and thinking – it’s called doing”.  When I heard it a couple of things immediately occurred to me.

First I thought, wow this is completely in sync with my running conversation (aka therapy) yesterday.   This is another “sign” that it is time to get your head out of your ass and do something, anything actually.  It is time to put on your big girl pants and act.  So then, what to do?  I am most definitely not a “rally” or “soapbox” person – I sometimes really wish I was.  However, those are not the only ways to contribute to a change that you can be proud of.  We all have different strengths.  Deep within whatever those strengths may be is the possibility that you will help someone in some small, but nonetheless important, way.  This has been a theme in my life before.  I see now, how it is rearing up again.  But this time with writing and being brave enough to actually share what I think and write.  For me this means publishing this blog to the world.  Sure I’ve been writing here for a while now but the real test for me is to let everyone KNOW I’m writing.  So, this week I am going to “publish” this blog to the world – well at least to my FB world and see where that goes.  This probably sounds pretty lame to some but to me it is one forward step of action.  This is action I can take to try to be heard and maybe even elicit some conversation that would not otherwise be had.

My second thought following “There is a space within you between wishing and thinking – it’s called doing”, was less about impacting the world and more about lifting up my family’s internal compass because, make no mistake, the anger and disappointment I feel most assuredly seeps into our home.  How can it not?  Then it occurred to me that our family has recently welcomed a new puppy, “Sunny Leia”.   Her picture is above this essay.  Pretty cute, right?  You might wonder why I thought of this in connection with taking action against hate and being heard?

Well, as I try to sleep on the couch so I can readily take the puppy out every few hours, I have been wondering why in the world we have this new puppy.  We have a wonderful chocolate lab named Jackson who is 13.  He is an awesome dog and always has been.  In fact, he is definitely not a dog but my other son, bringing my child total to 4.  Jackson is the one with 4 legs.  So why in the world get a puppy now?  Jackson is definitely in his twilight years but is in pretty good shape.

Sunny Leia came to us because I stumbled on an ad for puppies a few weeks ago.  I’ve seen other puppy ads but for some reason I became obsessed with this one.  It took me a while to convince my husband that having another dog would be good for Jackson and our family.  It didn’t take me long at all to convince my kids.  So, here we are with a new yellow lab, eight weeks old and, as you can see, adorable and sweet.  But I digress.  Why did this occur to me when thinking about taking action to uplift our moral compass?  It took me a while to figure it out but I think this is why.  How can you be angry or depressed when you are looking at this:

There is not much that is more genuine, innocent and kind than a new puppy.  I won’t say that she is pure joy – that would be lying.  She has definitely added to the work load.  But she does make us all really, really happy.  There is more laughter and smiling for sure.  You can’t be sad or discouraged when you have that to look at every day.  Sunny Leia has definitely shed light in an otherwise dark and scary time.

I think my point in all this is that, even though it may seem like there is nothing you can do to win against all the hate and divisiveness in our world right now, there really is.  You can take some action regardless of how small and insignificant it may seem.  Something that you can be proud of – like writing.  Something that brings joy to you, your family, and maybe even part of the outside world.  Step out of your comfort zone and feel good about it.  Use your strengths to brighten your world.  You might find that you brighten someone else too.  Or, you could just get a puppy.