New Year’s resolutions are intensely personal. While you might vow to eat less chocolate in the coming year, your neighbor maybe is promising to eat more of the creamy, delicious confection. And who are we to argue?
But while we each have our personal goals for the coming year and the start of a new decade, allow us to offer a suggestion for a collective effort to strengthen our communities and our nation. May we all pledge to stem the growing tide of discord and fear and anger that has infected the United States?
As a noted philosopher once said: “Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”
OK, OK, that was from Yoda and, yes, we know he is a fictional character. But that philosophy resonates as we ponder the year ahead and the prospect of that path to the dark side.
The path has been cleared over several years; it is not a new phenomenon. Yet while there always have been politicians and influencers eager to sow discord in a quest for power, incendiary words are increasingly being manifested as actions.
In August, a report from the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, headquartered at California State University, San Bernardino, found that reported hate crimes rose 9 percent in 30 major American cities in 2018 — the fifth straight year of an increase. In Washington, hate crimes increased 78 percent between 2013 and 2017.
The trend appears to be continuing. On Sunday, researchers at the center reported that hate crimes in the five largest U.S. cities rose sharply in 2019; national numbers are not yet available.
That announcement followed an event Saturday in which a man barged into a Hanukkah party in suburban New York and stabbed five people, adding to a spate of violence targeting Jewish people. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said: “This is a national phenomenon that we are seeing and it’s frightening and it’s disturbing. If anyone thinks that something poisonous is not going on in this country, then they’re in denial.”
It is, indeed, frightening and disturbing. While violent crime nationally has declined precipitously over the past 25 years, the uptick in attacks believed to be motivated by racial, religious or other bigotry does reflect a poison that is eating away at America. Earlier this month, President Donald Trump issued an executive order designed to “further the fight against the rise of anti-Semitism”; he added a statement saying, “The vile, hate-filled poison of anti-Semitism must be condemned and confronted everywhere and anywhere it appears.”
Those words are most welcome, although it must be mentioned that in 2017 Trump responded to a clash between Nazis and protesters in Charlottesville, Va., by saying, “you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.”
No, there is nothing fine about Nazis and the hateful rhetoric they espouse — something upon which nearly all Americans once agreed. Now, righteous Americans who care about the future of this country must resolve to vociferously oppose the growing enmity that is taking hold in this country. Bigotry against any ethnic or religious group must be rejected in order to preserve the United States’ ideal that all people are created equal.
That is how we vow to begin the new year — by working to help this nation to live up to its creed and by shining a light into the dark corners of the American psyche. Because fear is the path to the dark side.
