Recently, I watched the live-streamed memorial for Charlie Kirk, the recently slain political activist and organizer of the Christian right. During his life in the public eye, I considered many of his ideas abhorrent, bigoted and cruel. I still do, but I’m not interested in litigating his legacy right now. I would like instead to turn to the competing moral visions for our country that took the stage during the memorial itself.

On the one hand, Mr. Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, spoke about her love and devotion to her husband and her faith. She spoke about her desire to foster civic discourse and social change. She forgave her husband’s killer and called for rejecting hate and choosing love, saying “The answer to hate is not hate; the answer, we know from the Gospel, is love and always love.” I disagree with the political and cultural direction Mrs. Kirk wants to take the country, and I left the church myself many years ago, but I remember the moral teachings of the Gospels from my youth, I too believe in love, and I personally was moved by her words.

On the other hand, the president of the United States, Donald Trump, while at times delivering a conventional eulogy for Mr. Kirk, also took the opportunity to go on unscripted tangents demonizing his political opponents, promoting his own agenda and even dehumanizing autistic people like myself.

Most jarring, however, was his statement half-way through his speech: “I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them, I’m sorry.” It’s a curious thing to hear the leader of this country say, to imagine that the individual tasked with the highest office in the land, to guide his people with competence and poise, is preoccupied with such a petty thing as hate. In that moment, I felt the president to be very small. These are not the words of a man and a leader.

Of course, hate is a natural human emotion everyone has felt at one time or another, and in times of turmoil and tragedy we are all the more vulnerable to it. This is true in our national psychology as well. We all remember the excesses of the Red Scare and the War on Terror, for example, and in recent days I have seen people respond to Charlie Kirk’s murder, once again, with hate. Some who disagreed with his politics and morals celebrated his murder. Others took the opportunity to scapegoat their ideological opponents as responsible for the killer’s actions, dehumanize them, and call for repression and violence against them. This is not the answer.

One idea that shows up again and again in most if not all of the world’s religions and great philosophies is that hate is never the answer to hate, that it only begets more hate. Moreover, hate damages most of all the one who hates. It is like drinking poison and hoping someone else dies. Hate upsets our emotional balance, blinds us to reason and gives those whom we hate power over us. It drives us to see the world from a place of selfishness and insecurity. Our empathy and ability to see others as like ourselves is overridden. If our hate becomes so great that we begin to see others as not even human, it becomes possible to do inhuman things to them.

In a word, hate strips what is human from us. It is why the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., on seeing how hate disfigured the faces and souls of those who enforced white supremacy in the segregation era, concluded that “Hate is too great a burden to bear. I have decided to love.” He also went further, saying that love has to win power and use that power to correct the systemic injustices of poverty, racism and militarism that allow hate to take root. If we don’t, we see the destructive consequences in violence in the political arena, in our neighborhoods, even in our schools. We see it drive racial animus in police shootings, in the tearing apart and deportation of families, in the racist signage I see in my neighborhood claiming that only white families belong here. We see it in the villainization of our queer and trans neighbors. This is not the restoration of America: It is social disintegration.

I therefore urge readers not to hate Donald Trump, nor to hate his supporters, but simply to reject his moral vision for America and choose an alternative moral vision founded on love, like that of MLK. Reject the president’s calls to hate and retribution. Reject a radicalism that celebrates violence in the name of politics or religion. Hate is too great a burden for us to bear. The answer is love. And if we cannot learn to love one another, let us at least try not to hurt one

another.

William R. Harned is a Niles resident.