In the struggle throughout America to deal with the national problem of obesity, the well-meaning advocates of exercise, diet, and responsibility complete ignore the number one cause for obesity: how we live today. I don’t mean the references to our sedentary lifestyles, the unhealthy foods promoted, or the atmosphere that discourages exercise.  We hear about those problems frequently.  It is popular to talk about these failures in American culture on talk show on television, watched by people who are told if only you walk more, or if only you eat more broccoli, etc., your life will be better.

But these debates don’t mention the larger problem of the emotional storms of abuse, anger, hopelessness, and even hatred against ourselves and one another. Moreover, we view such emotional storms as someone else’s problem, not a societal responsibility to address.  We have emergency repair organizations and the Red Cross to deal with physical storms, floods, and disasters.

But who can the millions turn to in dealing with the crises of emotional storms that regularly lash our lives as human beings?  Some turn to their religious faiths, a very small number seek counseling.  But the vast majority who face such emotional storms are simply ignored, forgotten, and expected to address their issues without guidance and without help.  Society believes that emotional storms, after all, aren’t “real storms” and they don’t really require societal involvement.

We have entire television channels devoted to addressing and preparedness for physical weather storms, but when it comes to emotional storms within our lives, American society largely fails to even acknowledge that they are a societal problem.  They are, after all, just “part of life,” or as years ago people would say “into every life some rain must fall” when dealing with emotional trauma, fear, hopelessness, abuse, and anger.

For many, they find shelter from such storms in “comfort foods” as their drug of choice to help cope with emotional storms and trauma. Then we wonder why we have a national problem with obesity, and many blame the “laziness” of our public for this.  This spins the wheel of negativity once again, as the latest self-help doctor on television tells the public, if only you would eat better, work out more, you would not be overweight or sick.  How we feel as human beings and as a society?  That’s too complicated and it takes too much time (see “life at the speed of hate”).  Our society has the same approach to cigarette, alcohol, drug addiction.  The addictions are the problem, not our lives, not the emotional storms that we ignore as a society.

We are too busy building our prosperity to care about how each other feels.  This then gives us the money to find countermeasures to the food, alcohol, drug, etc. self-medication attempts to cope with the real problem of the emotional storms within our lives — that we choose to ignore as a society. But the result is the same regardless of what we use to self-medicate ourselves in the emotional storms that lash our lives.  There is no visible option or consideration for many to channel their lives to help their community, to help in social responsibility, as a means to cope with these problems. Too many have lives that are solely centered around the stress, anger, abuse, fear, and hopelessness in their own lives – yet our society does not acknowledge this as a problem.  There is no association with this problem and our larger societal struggles with hate.

What does it have to do with hate?

It is not just that people feel hopeless, powerless, and frustrated in their lives.

Too many hate their lives and they hate themselves. While American television shows promote the latest diets, the latest execise machines, we allow a national epidemic of self-hatred to go unchallenged and even unacknowledged. Society allow us to believe that hating ourselves is fine.   Then we wonder why we are an angry nation.

So if our society tolerates self-hatred, why should our society expect to challenge hatred against others?  It may not be as socially acceptable in some areas, but when we teach acceptance of hatred – no matter who it is directed at – we are teaching acceptance of the most destructive force against all of humanity.

Once we are taught that it is acceptable to hate ourselves, too many are ultimately driven to hate their fellow human beings. It is a short distance to travel.

Such hatred (towards ourselves and each other) and such emotional storms don’t simply seek to kill us.  They seek to DESTROY us as human beings from the inside one at a time. Then collectively, the virus of hatred and indifference to our fellow human beings spreads and becomes a way of societal life.

Hate seeks to turn our human bodies into inhuman vessels of negativity, violence, and hatred towards humanity itself.  Ultimately, there is nothing that the inhuman grip of hatred would not force us to do, even destroy humanity itself.  Hate is the ultimate in self-destructive forces in humanity.

But we can choose another path.  We can give victory to tolerance, have the courage of compassion, and build a path and platform to love and compassion.  Even when we think we are enslaved by our problems and pressed into a corner by our emotional storms, we still can choose.  There is another way.

All of us in our society struggles between hate and tolerance every day.  Every time we show restraint, every time we offer compassion and mercy, we take another step towards human dignity in our societies.  But our world and our lives are often beset with emotional storms that we must acknowledge as a society.  We must find ways to protect our hearts and minds from the abuse, not simply internalize the abuse and allow it to become a part of our identities.  When abuse seeks to drive us to hate, we must reach instead for love.

But of all those we must love, we must first love ourselves as worthy human beings.

When the voices attacking us from without and from within rage around us, we must find a quiet place of human sanctuary that will not allow our self worth, our self dignity to be denied.  When hate seeks to invade our sanctuary of self, we must tell hate “we will not be moved.”

In that quiet place of humanity, we must reaffirm to Choose Love, Not Hate – Love Wins.