Murder

I've been seeing the headlines about the killing of Trayvon Martin, a horrible tragedy. I have to pause and wonder, though, why we need to bring RACE into the forefront so severely as to have rallies about it. I am not saying that racists don't still exist--clearly they do--or that Trayvon's killer was not racist, as he most probably was. My thought, however, is that the larger problem besides racism is actually hatred. That someone could amass enough hatred in their psyche to murder another human being is the real problem. And there are plenty of other families whose children are killed, murdered, for this very reason. It might not be because the child was black or hispanic or any other race, but simply because the killer (a high school student who shoots his classmates, for instance) had enough hatred to murder. So what is the answer to racism? Racism isn't the problem. Hatred is the problem. Hatred for ANY reason, because any reason to hate is a bad reason. We hear so often that such and such murder was "a senseless tragedy," but what does that say about Trayvon Martin's murder? Because it was likely racially motivated, does that make it any less "senseless"? Are we acknowledging that in general there's a lack of logic in intense, murderous hatred, but not in racially-motivated hatred? Clearly not. We need to pray for conversion, and for the opposit of hatred, love: that love and examples of love will be offered to young people, and that they will reject the values of revenge and hatred. That is the only realistic path to stopping murder in all its forms.