Faces Off, 2019
“A sickness known as hate. Not a virus, not a microbe, not a germ — but a sickness nonetheless, highly contagious, deadly in its effects. Don’t look for it in the Twilight Zone — look for it in a mirror. Look for it before the light goes out altogether.”
–Rod Serling, Twilight Zone, I Am the Night, 1964
It’s hard to witness, let alone fathom, the level of hatred being displayed around the world at the moment. In every corner of the globe there seems to be a surge of deadly vitriol directed at whatever group represents The Other in that particular place.
It very much feels like the hatred that Rod Serling‘s narrator described as a contagious sickness of at the end of a 1964 Twilight Zone episode has become a true global epidemic.
A pandemic of hatred that makes the Covid virus pale in comparison.
What can be done to end it or even slow its spread?
I surely don’t know and if there is a person who can one day come up with a workable solution, they will be rightly celebrated as the greatest person to ever tread this earth. In my opinion, for what it’s worth, it won’t come from religious figures or politicians or billionaire industrialists or technocrats. They’ve already tried to shape the world to their designs for thousands of years and have little progress to show in the way of alleviating the hatred that engulfs us. In fact, they have seemed to have made the divisions between the various peoples of the planet even deeper and wider.
I think that if a consortium of scientists from around the world were to miraculously discover a single gene within all of us that controlled our hatred and were able to easily remove it without harming us in any way, I don’t believe we would even accept that solution. Too many of have come to covet this sickness, to view it as a treasure, the thing that brings meaning, however twisted and destructive it is, to their lives. These people would gladly keep the infection alive.
I wish I had the answer. I wish you had the answer. I wish anyone anywhere had a way of ridding of us of this sickness that is hatred. Because, like the horrible infection it is, it destroys all things it touches.
Nothing good is born of hatred nor has it ever been. Hatred’s only creation is more hatred. It is a purely destructive force that holds us all captive. So much time and effort is spent in both carrying out this hatred and in fighting against it that many efforts that might enrich the lives of all are swept aside and ignored altogether. Perhaps never to come to fruition.
Just another side effect of the illness.
Until we find an antidote of some sort, none of us are free from the reach of that sickness.
Let’s end it on that line. That brings us to this week’s Sunday Morning Music. The song is None of Us Are Free. It was written in 1993 by the renowned songwriting team of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil along with Brenda Russell for Ray Charles. The song was later recorded in 2002 by Solomon Burke, a great version that I shared here a couple of years back. But the original below is wonderful, featuring a great horn section and backup vocals along with guitar work from Eric Clapton in a time when the sickness had not yet fully affected him.
Maybe art and music and literature will inoculate us? I don’t know but it can’t hurt…
Redtree Times 