How to Make Sure Your Children Hate the Right People

Our society has been progressing steadily and luckily is well on its way to making sure our children hate the right people. The good thing is this is fairly easy. Since children emulate our example, make sure you do the following so your children are guaranteed to hate the right people:

1. Destroy the lives of people who think differently than you. Thumbs them down on social media. Find any place on the internet they are mentioned and give them one star reviews. Rant in a post on their page or blog. Tell everyone online and off that you are boycotting them. Make their every day a living hell so they pay for their differences.

2. Affirm people are 100% evil or 100% good. Make sure your children understand you are 100% good and the people they should hate are 100% evil. Make sure they understand any accident or mistake or action taken that is at odds with what you would have chosen means hated people are 100% evil and past so-called good deeds are wiped out. Also, any future so-called good deeds must be reviled so we remind our children this person can never change their 100% evilness.

3. Call people names in person and on social media. Know your labels and use them. Brand people with broad brushes of racism, misogyny, and Nazism. Also apply these labels 100%. Don't allow any actions that seem to deny these labels to be lauded. One statement is enough to know a person's heart 100%.

4. Shun entire families. Don't stop with the person who thinks differently; their family also deserves to suffer the consequences. Your children should understand that anyone associated with the one you hate is unworthy of kindness or consideration.

5. Never, ever give grace. Grace is weakness. Grace isn't standing for justice or truth. Grace is letting people get away with their 100% evil. Don't give people chances. Don't assume they can change. Don't try to understand their worldview or humanity. If you do, you might start feeling for them and be hoodwinked into their evil.

If it isn't clear by now, this post is sarcastic exaggeration, but unfortunately not far off from the way so many are treated these days. People pick a target for their anger, often someone who thinks differently than they do, and then release all their rage. Most do it under the guise of righteousness, but it still has the same result: the destruction of a person. Whenever I see this, I've wanted to ask, "If I gave you a gun and put you in a room with the object of your hate, would you shoot them in the head? If not, why not? You've made it clear they have no business in your world or on the earth. You've made it clear you wish they would go away. Couldn't you save the world with a bullet to the head? If you wouldn't go that far, why? What would you do instead if you were locked in a room with the object of your hate?"

You know what I hope would happen? Actual discussion. Actual getting to know the person. Actual understanding more than visceral feeling. That the gun would be dropped and compassion might reign.

My daughter and I are reading a book that draws on art to talk about various character traits. Recently the trait was respect and the painting was of people throwing a man into the sea to drown him because he believed differently. The book talked about respecting people even if their ideas are different than us. I hadn't found any children's sources that said this. Tons of picture books talk about being okay with physical differences, but with someone's different thoughts?

I think we need to talk more with our children about not hating people. About what it looks like to not hate people you vehemently disagree with. About how to love people you will never see eye to eye with. As a Christian, how to honor the image of God in every person. If we keep going the way we are now, our children will learn the way to live is to love those who love you and make sure to destroy those you hate. Our children listen to us and watch us. What does your life say about how to treat people you disagree with?