For Love or For Anger

Sometimes I wonder which is stronger, love or hate.  I know this sounds very deep and philosophical and everything, and while I could look at it this way, for the time being, let's just examine it in a very superficial light.

I heard a wonderful quote on the news the other day, saying that people voting in the currently political environment are less likely to vote FOR one candidate and their position, as AGAINST someone else's position, and by default, go for the "lesser of two evils" option.  This perhaps explains the prevalence of "attack ads" and campaigns that are based on the premise of "Look how much of an idiot my opponent is!  Vote for me, I'm not nearly as bad as the other guy!"

This makes me wonder if people are really more likely to be drawn together by a common love of something, be it pizza or jazz or a certain type of clothing, or more likely to find something to pick apart and bond over that.  It seems like picking something apart requires far less harmony between members than loving something does.  Who cares WHY you hate black/white/Jewish/Irish/Catholic/gay/whatever people,  as long as you don't like them as much as someone else, you'll be able to agree that it's a good idea to go beat the crap out of them.  Hate brings everyone down to the lowest common level, a level that agrees something is wrong.

Loving something or someone requires harmony.  If you love pizza, maybe it's because you like cheese or tomatoes or dough.  Maybe it's because it reminds you of home or your friends or picnics.  If you love pizza for its melted cheese, and someone else loves it because it reminds them of football games, then perhaps you will begin an argument over whose love is more pure, is more correct, is better.  If hate brings everyone down to the common basement of anger, love is something that everyone fights over to reach the top rung of purest devotion.

I went to a lecture this weekend by the wonderful author David Sedaris.  In reading one of his works, he mentioned that people in a line in an airport were arguing about politics, and saying how they hated the current administration.  They thought that the president could do nothing right, they hated him, and he was destroying the country.  While everyone is entitled to their own opinion, Sedaris and these particular people were obviously on opposite sides of the political fence, and Sedaris mentioned that he wanted to yell back at them that he could hate just as much as they could, sure they had different opinions, but everyone can hate!  But he followed by saying that being able to out-hate someone is something that should never be encouraged.  Just because we can hate, just because we can have common anger over something doesn't mean it is the path that we should strive to follow.

While this all sounds very kumbaya and progressive and up-in-the-clouds, when Sedaris said it, it didn't sound like that.  It sounded like, honestly, can't we find a better common ground than "Let's all go hate the same things!"  And it makes me wonder, which is really the more binding of the two, common hate or common love?