What this world needs is a cure for hatred

THERE is a cruelty in hatred that exceeds even physical abuse because it is so much more pervasive and lasting.

It burns over the boundaries of many generations, simmering in the collective memories of an entire population.

What makes it more terrible is that the hatred is contained within the same human family, the only species capable of an emotion that transcends need. Hatred isn’t a requirement of life. One has to work at it.

It concerns me on this day, at this writing, because of a series of events dealing with immigration. The first was that May Day melee in MacArthur Park that, because of a few who threw rocks and bottles, turned into a devastating reprisal by members of the LAPD against anyone in their path.

Immigrants of every status gathered to protest what they felt was a vendetta against them by those whose ethnic hatreds had spilled over into what otherwise might have been a political debate.

After I wrote about it, I received e-mail so vile and offensive that I can’t repeat most of it here. One especially vulgar missive came from a man in Big Bear who rattled on about Mexicans destroying L.A. and ended it in a tirade of obscenity directed at me, a “Mexican mutt.”

He especially decried the ignorance of those migrating from south of the border while simultaneously demonstrating his inability to put together an invective-free sentence that made any sense.

Oddly, e-mails and letters like his were followed by news that a bipartisan group of U.S. senators was sponsoring a measure that would allow immigrants in the U.S. illegally to become citizens. Even President Bush hailed it.

The two events embraced a peculiar mix of hatred and hope, of which there is so much more of the former and so little of the latter. We are a world on fire with animosities that stretch back into history. They are racial, ethnic, religious and tribal, their origins sometimes so convoluted that no one is quite sure where they began.

The current outbreak of hatred is like a virus that has spread through most parts of the world, worse than AIDS or other communicable diseases. It has infected populations on every continent, deliberately pandemic, without containment or cure.

The most recent demonstration of mindless hatred was revealed in a story we carried Monday on Page A4, perhaps too horrifying for better exposure but at least laid out for all to see: the stoning to death of a young woman in northern Iraq because she was in love with a boy from another sect. She was a Yazidi, he a Sunni.

Exposed on television as well as print, the incident soon became a political debate, the dead girl in the street little more than a symbol of division among religious groups. A life ended at 17 because of love seemed too great a contradiction to be ignored and fit into the waves of deadly hatreds that are consuming us.

The drooling antipathy emerging from the racist in Big Bear was just another day at work for me. I hear from unfortunate haters like him any time an ethnic issue arises, but, thank God, I hear more often from those who can debate with intelligence and reason.

The years harden guys like me to the existence of hatemongers. The hide toughens and arrows bounce off. But the young haven’t yet developed the ability to shake off incidents that hurt deeply and remain a part of the physiology of their lives, at any age.

I can recall in college preparing for a first date with a woman of deep religious convictions who advised me on the day I

was supposed to pick her up to park about a half block away and just wait. When I seemed confused, she explained that her parents would be enraged if they

knew she was dating a Mexican.

The incident remains like a scar on my soul, and I couldn’t forget it even if I wanted to. The truth is I don’t want to because, like a course in human behavior, it is a constant reminder of how cruel hatred can be and how deeply destructive its expansion is to the whole human race.

We will someday find a cure for AIDS and cancer and for other deadly diseases that threaten the world’s population. But hatred conceals itself in the guise of purity and godliness, hiding its evil intentions until long after the damage is done.

My generation has lived with hatred through wars and economic stress, and we’re still living with it. Whenever I feel it might be lessening, a message from the devil’s own lair hurtles at me through cyberspace, through newsprint or through a television screen to warn me that hate endures, glowing like an ember in the human psyche. One wonders if we will ever be free.

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays.