In a world full of hate and hurt, love must be a conscious choice

By David McElroy · March 12, 2022

I’m not certain whether I love this world or hate it. I’m never sure whether I love my fellow humans or hate all of us. How can I be so confused about this?

There are times when I experience beauty and love and joy as I walk through this world. In those moments, I feel as though all is right and I’m at peace. I feel as though I love the people around me and want to connect with them. In those moments, it’s a joy to be alive.

But there are times when mundane and callous actions by others pierce my heart and make me hurt and cynical. In those times, I sometimes hear an inner voice crying, “I hate everybody!” In those moments, I want to give up on humans and become a hermit. I wonder why God made us.

Am I confused? Schizo? Bi-polar?

Not really. I’m just experiencing very different parts of what it means to be alive. And as much as I want to rage against the things which hurt me and make me want to run away, I have to accept that my own choices have brought me to where I am. Even when others have taken actions which have hurt me and angered me, I am the one with the power to change my own life.

Nobody can do it for me. I have to change myself in order to change my experience of this world.

I read a piece of advice the other day that made me cynically scoff at its naïveté:

“Decide that kind of life you actually want. Then say no to everything that isn’t that.”

The idea is ridiculous. I’m just going to say no to being hurt or being alone. I’m going to refuse to do any work which doesn’t make me happy. I’m going to say no to taxes and politicians and more. It’s ridiculous.

But after I let the cynicism fade, I realized that I was eager to make sure I could blame others for the things which I don’t like in my life. Although there will always be things about this world — and my fellow humans — which are not what I want them to be, I realized that my choices drive how I interpret my experiences.

I can choose to believe that other people hate me and intentionally hurt me. Or I can choose to believe that they are hurting people who are doing the best they can. I can realize that they are just as confused and clueless as I’ve been when I’ve hurt others.

No matter how I thought about this, I kept coming back to my own choices.

I’m the one who determines how other people see me. I have a great influence on how they react to me. And I can decide whether I’m going to judge other people by the same standards I have for myself — or if I’m going to make excuses for myself and harshly condemn them.

If I can remain conscious of this, I can have more empathy for others. And I can also have more empathy for myself. Because we are all constantly making choices — and hoping things will be different this time.

Sometimes we get things right. Sometimes we make the wrong choices. Sometimes we live up to our own values. Other times, we fail and we make excuses for the messes we make.

Life is messy and we’re going to make mistakes. I’ve made more than my share of those mistakes. But through the ups and downs that we create for ourselves, we can see what it’s like to be loved — and we can see what it’s like to love someone else in a genuine way.

We can also experience what it’s like for others to be hateful and nasty to us. We can know what it’s like for others to mistreat us and allow us to be hurt.

But if we’re paying attention, we can make choices that guide us back toward the light. We can say no to the things which we discover are evil and hurtful. We can transform our own hearts to be more loving and decent to others. We can even learn to love ourselves.

But it’s a choice.

This world will never be perfect. It will never be filled with people who are flawless and always loving. But we can learn to make loving choices, for ourselves and others. We can learn to move away from hateful and hurtful people. We can learn to choose loving and nurturing people to be in our lives.

If we make the right choices — every single day — we can experience more of the love and joy of this world. And less of the hate and hurt.

It’s a matter of growing and maturing. It’s admitting our failures and asking for help. It’s learning wisdom in the face of our mistakes.

There will always be plenty of hate and hurt in this world, but our choices can bring us love and joy. In the midst of the pain and hatred of this lost world, we can choose to create our own tiny refuge of love.

We can never change the things we’ve done to create what we have now — whatever has brought us the hurt and pain — but we can start making better decisions for the future. At least in our hearts, we can try to create a paradise on Earth.

It starts with a conscious choice to change ourselves. And then this world might look very different when we look at it through the lens of love.

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It hasn’t happened yet, but there’s a possibility that I might be taking in a fourth feline. A couple of months ago, a cat-loving neighbor asked whether I’d seen a “tuxedo cat” hanging out in the neighborhood. I hadn’t, but this guy eventually wandered past my house a few weeks later — and we haven’t been able to find evidence that he has a home. I’ve been giving him water and food for the last week and he finally let me pet him two nights ago. He’s purred for me two nights in a row and he let me take a low-quality selfie with him Thursday night. Tonight, though, he let me pick him up and bring him inside to look around. This went surprisingly well, as you can see from this photo. I don’t know whether he’ll be joining the family, but I’m certain that Alex, Oliver and Sam would vote no, at least until they get to know him. I’m trying to make certain he doesn’t have a home, but if he does join us, what do you suppose his name will be?

It turns out that the radical far left has been training “Antifa cats” to sabotage anything important to Donald Trump. Everything he did was perfect. Honest. It was all the cats’ fault. Arrest all the cats! This is the latest of my ridiculous satirical shorts. Please go watch it. Then “like” it and subscribe. Please. I’m begging you. (Too much?) Although a couple of the previous videos have had views in the hundreds, most have still been seen by fewer than 20 people. So I seem to be having trouble letting people know that page exists.

Here’s the latest of my ridiculous parody shorts. It crossed my mind Tuesday to wonder what a slick and fast-talking car dealer might do right now to try to turn the high price of gasoline to his advantage. So I conceived of a fat and lovable character who tried to sell cars that don’t use any fuel — and then I started wondering if it would be funnier if all the characters were felines. Designing the King Cashpaw character took about four hours, but the rest took only another four hours, so this was a relatively quick piece that virtually wrote itself. I know it’s almost impossible for these parody videos to find a larger audience, but at least they amuse me — and there are 19 of them on my YouTube page now. The first few were very limited, but they’re getting more complex.

The Republican Party is dead. It still exists in name, of course, but it’s nothing but a shell. All that’s left are idiots and stooges and con men of the MAGA party. When Donald Trump is gone — which won’t be long — those populist idiots and pragmatic fools will have no one to follow. Democrats will thrive. They will take more power than ever and they will push the federal government further to the radical far left than ever. When that happens, don’t just blame Trump if you’re a conservative. Blame every person who has claimed to be a conservative and has given up on principles, character and everything else that Republicans once claimed to stand for. As someone who worked as a GOP political consultant for many years, this is disgusting and disturbing to me. Those who have enabled Trump to have almost unchecked power are going to be shocked when they see what they will unleash in the long run. It’s been plain all along what this narcissistic con man is. It’s your fault that you chose to pretend not to see what he really is.

We are ruled by the dumbest and most incompetent people among us — and we have a system which allows stupid and irresponsible people to force the costs of their idiocy onto smarter and wiser people. Can we get away with that? Yes, for quite some time. But we eventually reach a point at which the dumbest of the dumb — who are habitual liars and mentally ill fools — lead us to the disasters and destruction that some of us have seen coming for years. We are approaching that point. And yet most of the idiots around us still wave their rhetorical banners of support for the evil people who are leading us to ruin — and all of them point their fingers at someone else, never noticing that their own enthusiastic support of evil is to blame. When things finally fall apart, blame yourself for your blindness to the evil, not whoever happens to be in power when it happens.

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