“They’re just a bunch of faggots,” was the phrase I heard from someone as I was walking the streets of Pocatello on Wednesday. It took me about 5 minutes before it hit me like a 20 pound sledge  slammed into my head. I hadn’t just  witnessed another case of homophobia, I had been witness to the root of all evil. The cause that allows people to maim, torture, rape, murder, kill and brutalize each other and still feel righteous and good. The black gnarled roots are the ability to dehumanize. To label a group of people based on an arbitrarily disagreeable trait and hate them for it.

When a person becomes less than human in one’s eyes they become an animal. And like our ancestors on the African plains hunting animals for physical nourishment, we hunt those we dehumanize to sustain our twisted ideas, because after all they are only faggots or niggers or chinks or jews. The only way to overcome this evil is to come to the realization that we are all human. I have known many people from many backgrounds and I have never once met a person I couldn’t relate to. Not a single person who hadn’t had a similar human experience to me.

Unfortunately the only way to kill this black thorny weed which seeks to snuff out all but the “chosen” is to win the minds of the complacent majority. To get those who listen to their silently elected hate mongers to reject that hate and show them that we all have something to share with each other. This is no easy task because the powers we are taking on hold the keys to the cage of the mind. I am talking about any  group of people who claim they are more pure and chosen than another. I won’t name names because then I become no better than those I seek to oppose, in the arena of rationality, but we who are on the same mission, to bring equality to all people of the world, know who they are.