[god hates]

I went to the Westboro Baptist Church protest at the federal courthouse in Baltimore City today. I took a bunch of pictures and interviewed several people, as well as participated in fruitless efforts to understand why exactly WBC felt the need to do what they are doing and/or how their brains work.

I thought I was going to write a blog post about the protest. I still have the pictures and probably will at some point, but I think deep inside I knew that a blog post was never the true purpose of me attending that event. I needed to find something.

Lately I've been thinking a lot about love. And not like, the romantic boy-girl kind of love. And not the kind that goes or doesn't go along with sex. Although truthfully, I believe that all of those 'kinds' of love are one and the same. Maybe it's more accurate to say that I'm not thinking about love in those contexts.

Love is so insanely simple. It's so simple that we as humans feel the need to complicate it. We categorize and dichotomize. We label and extrapolate and place social constructions around each 'category' or 'type' of love. We use sex and language to divide and define, and we present love as black or white, existent or non, 1 or 0.

As a society, we often mock those who say "I love you" soon after meeting a person. We perceive that love is serious, complicated, and takes a long time to truly develop. Until this prestigious level of knowing, understanding, and dedication to another person is reached, the developing feelings may not be called love. We create euphemisms like 'care about' and 'like' to allow us to express affection without claiming that what we are feeling is love.

I'm a loving person. I thrive on loving and being loved. I'm not a nice person, maybe. Or at least, I am only selectively nice. I am intense. There have been many people who have passed through my life that I have loved very fiercely who I have never told that I loved them because of the social implications that it would hold. There are many people right now who I still can't say those words to because of the way it would 'complicate' things. But its very existence is simple. The admittance that it exists is what is perceived as complicated.

But I too dichotomize. If I feel unloved in a person or environment, I become very stressed out and close myself off emotionally from those around me. Sometimes I even force an outward impression of emotions just to make up for the absence of sincere ones. I form a dichotomy between "I want to love and be loved here," and "I am a fortress. I will isolate myself to avoid getting hurt."

The protest today was so full of hate. I looked into the eyes of a girl about my age as she spewed out the catchphrases of hatred she had been brainwashed with, and I wondered how one could live so full of hatred and devoid of love. It made me re-examine myself as a person.

At the end of STRiVE everyone in my pod critiqued each other's leadership styles and skills, and one of my pod-mates spoke about what made me lovable, which I had not expected. For me, love has been kept so separate from the activism I have been doing. It has been about human rights and equality, not love.

But what I realized at that protest today is that activism MUST be about love and not hatred. So many of the problems in the queer rights movement stem from hatred. Hatred for straight people, hatred for police, hatred for the government, hatred for 'sexual deviants' that are marginalized within the community, and hatred for anyone who stands in our way as we fight for equal rights.

Is it possible to 'fight' for something out of love, or does the very term 'fight' imply that hatred is involved? I have decided that although I am certainly angry and hurt, my true driving force in life is love.

And in case you are reading this (or you, or you, or you), I just wanted you to know that I love you. But there are no implications behind that statement. I just do. What that means perhaps has yet to be determined.