A Cycle of Hate
Do you hate this child? It feels unthinkable to ask, yet much of the world seems to hate her—or at least, people like her.
In her gaze, there is a silent plea—not for pity, but for understanding. Born into a world of chaos, she is a refugee, fleeing a conflict not of her making—a conflict that many Western powers have, directly or indirectly, played a significant role in fuelling. Now, displaced and dehumanised, living in a makeshift camp with an old blanket as her crib, she faces further alienation as biased media and populist commentators from those same Western countries use hateful words to describe her: "illegal," "invader," even "vermin." Words so detached from humanity that they strip her of the right to simply be a child.
It leads me to wonder: when did the world learn to hate? After all, nobody is born with hate; it is a learned emotion. The uncomfortable truth is that adults actively teach their children to hate, who, in turn, grow up to teach their children. It is a cycle of hate that uses the language of discrimination, segregation, and aggression to corrupt the innocence of youth, turning refugees like this child into symbols of fear and division, their humanity overshadowed by political agendas.
But if hatred can be taught, so too can compassion. We can choose to teach our children to see what unites us as human beings rather than what divides us. We can choose to break the cycle before it consumes us all.
And so, I ask again: do you hate this child?
