There is no escape from hate in America. It is the air we breathe, the food we eat, the slogans we repeat without thought. Hate is unconditional here. You don’t have to earn it, you don’t have to provoke it, you don’t even have to open your mouth — it will find you. Hate comes baked into our history, welded into our laws, stamped on our money, broadcast through our pulpits, and shouted from the podiums of men who claim to be leaders.
Other nations know anger. They know prejudice. They know cruelty. But America, my America, has elevated hate into a civic virtue. We treat it like a birthright. If you’re white, you’re taught to fear the Black neighbor. If you’re Black, you’re taught to distrust the cop. If you’re poor, you’re despised for being poor. If you’re rich, you’re hated for being rich. If you’re foreign, if you’re queer, if you’re a woman with a voice, if you’re a man with too little power, if you’re anyone at all — you are somebody’s enemy.
And the horror is not that hate exists. The horror is that we have learned to need it. It keeps us warm when empathy would leave us cold. It keeps us entertained when compassion would bore us. It is our national glue, the one thing we all share, even as it rips us apart.
We cannot love our country if we cannot stop hating each other
Hate is not only fuel — it is comfort. It is the blanket we wrap around ourselves when the world makes no sense. After the assassination of Charlie Kirk, what did the nation reach for? Not grief. Not compassion. Not the ache of mortality that should have reminded us of our shared fragility. No, what poured out was hate — pure and unconditional.
For his admirers, hate meant pointing at “the radical left,” at imagined conspiracies, at entire categories of people who must have “pulled the trigger in spirit.” Hate warmed them against the cold fact that violence can strike without reason. For his detractors, hate meant a different solace — the smug relief of seeing a man they despised silenced, the quiet whisper that maybe the ledger had balanced itself. In both cases, hate kept the blood circulating. It gave people something easy to hold onto when the harder truth — that life is random and death comes sudden — threatened to freeze them in terror.
Hate is our national morphine drip. When tragedy hits, we don’t reach for truth, we reach for blame. When the wound is open, we don’t suture it with understanding, we cauterize it with fire. We tell ourselves that hate makes us strong, but in reality it only numbs us — numbs us to pain, numbs us to humanity, numbs us to the possibility that we might be more than this endless cycle of rage.
I am shaken by the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Shaken, though I did not like Charlie Kirk. I did not respect Charlie Kirk. I most definitely did not and cannot agree with his politics. In lazy commentary, I easily could have said, “I hate Charlie Kirk.” His brutal assassination has left me haunted by those words. I never wanted this murder. I never would wish it on anyone, whether I agreed with their philosophy or not. But still, I feel the cold echo of my own careless speech.
Did my kids hear me say that? My wife? My friends? When I mocked Charlie Kirk, did it sound like hatred? Did it sound like I wanted him dead? I did not, but words have a way of drifting, growing, hardening into something larger than the intent that first birthed them.
This is the horror of being an American: hate is not only easy, it is expected. We inherit it like a national dialect, and when we fail to resist it, we pass it along. The ease with which I called an opponent an enemy, even in jest, feels now like complicity. And if I, who pride myself on reflection, fell into that trap so casually, what of the millions who never stop to second-guess themselves?
I do not know the next steps for myself or for my country. But I do know this: continuing this easy hatred of our opponents, this childish categorization of brave and confident individuals who happen to have different opinions as enemies, must stop. The passive permeation of hate as an acceptable way to live one’s life is a poison. If we cannot resist it, we will continue to watch the blood spill, and then watch ourselves grow numb to it.
Hate has kept us warm for too long. It is the fire in our veins when our souls go cold. It is the counterfeit comfort we press against our wounds when grief and confusion feel unbearable. But it is not just comforting warmth, it is a fever. It does not heal; it consumes.
If hate is the American dream, then waking up will be the true revolution
The assassination of Charlie Kirk should be a moment for us to ask: Is this what we want to be? A people who can only metabolize tragedy through rage? A people who can only find meaning in murder by assigning it to the column of “ours” or “theirs”? That way of living may numb the pain, but it also makes us complicit in the endless cycle of blood.
I am guilty of this. I have spoken words that, stripped of irony, sounded like hate. I have let the language of contempt pass too easily through my lips, because in America, hate feels natural. It feels safe. But it is neither. It is the slow erosion of our humanity.
The horror of being an American is that hate is unconditional. You do not have to earn it. You do not have to choose it. It is waiting for you, offered like a warm coat on a cold night. And yet, if we keep wearing it, it will suffocate us.
So I will tear mine off. And I will tell my children, my wife, my friends: resist this false comfort. Resist the warmth of hate. It will leave us frozen, in the end. The only path forward is colder, harder, lonelier at first — but it is the path of truth, of dignity, of refusing to let hate write the next headline in blood.
If hate is the warmth of America, then we must learn to live in the cold