On Sunday night I participated in a small peace march here in Yarmouth. We lamented the violence in Charlottesville. We sang “We Shall Overcome,” but when I heard myself singing “Deep in my heart, I do believe that we shall overcome someday,” I realized that, right now, deep in my heart, I don’t believe that we will overcome this anger, this hatred of the other side. The chasm seems too deep, the divide, too wide to bridge.

It’s true that we must put an end to the vile, hateful rhetoric that spews from the white supremacists, the Ku Klux Klan and the neo-Nazis. But the far-right fringes do not have a monopoly on hatred. It exists across the political, national, international, ethnic, religious and racial spectrum. We are all guilty.

Soon after President Trump took office, I placed a bumper sticker on my car. “RESIST HATE,” it proclaimed. At the time, I assumed that it meant “Resist Trump’s hate”; “Resist the hate of this Republican administration”; “Resist the hate of all those ‘deplorables’ who voted for Trump.”

But in facing my own anger and contempt, I realized that those of us on the left can be as intolerant and self-righteous as those on the right. Perhaps the answer to this seeming impasse in our country’s path toward a more perfect union is for each of us to confront and resist the hate that lives within our own hearts.

Julie Krasne

Yarmouth

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