Legacy Letter to My Son and Daughter

Legacy Letter to My Son and Daughter

As I sit down to write this letter to my son and daughter, the television is on in the background. Osama bin Laden, America's number one Public Enemy, has been killed. This is no doubt a victory for America, and, his death was probably inevitable in the quest for justice, as it is unlikely that he would have been willing to be taken alive. However, it makes me stop and think about what I want to teach you. I want the two of you to embrace, if nothing else from Christianity, the morals from Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. I want you to forgive and to love, because hate consumes the vessel that carries it. However, I also want you to understand that sometimes justice means ugliness. This is a dichotomy that I still do not necessarily understand myself, but it is something that people in power have to recognize

Please do not misunderstand me; I am not a person who thinks that hate is only a negative emotion. I think that hate can be a very constructive emotion. Hate can motivate people to move beyond ugly circumstances and to improve themselves, proving the adage that living well may be the best revenge. I also think that much of what people label hate is actually hurt, and the feeling of hate keeps them from going back to the people and circumstances that have hurt them in the past. This type of hate is constructive. However, I have also learned that hate can destroy the vessel. The more time you spend on negative emotions, the more power you give the person who originally hurt you. One day, you wake up and realize that an event that took them 10 minutes to do to you has stolen days or even years of your life. When hate is ruling your life, when you hate something more strongly than you love anything, then hate is destructive. It is in those moments that you must offer forgiveness. I am not going to tell you that you have to forgive the person who harmed you, but you must forgive yourself for allowing their harm to define you, and you must move on and choose a new definition for yourself. Even in a tragedy like 9-11, the survivors had a choice to move on and find happiness or to allow an act of terrorism to become their definition. If you are ever put in a similar position, remember that you are the one who controls whether you become a victim or a survivor.

Watching the President's speech and his comments about Muslims, I was hit with the sinking realization that killing Bin Laden would not result in an increase in tolerance towards Muslims, but somehow lead to a resurgence in the belief that somehow all Muslims are terrorists, or, at the very least, terrorist sympathizers. While the immediate aftermath of 9-11 was a coming-together of the American people, pretty soon people were pointing figures at American Muslims. That Muslims were also victimized by the terrorists seemed to escape many people's notice. Furthermore, the rising religious intolerance seemed to spur intolerance of all types of religions. The prevailing attitude of many Americans was that if you did not fit their definition of a devout Christian person, you did not have a place in America. It was a horrifying thing, to see my countrymen respond to terrorism by religious extremists by proposing that we become religious extremists. However, it led me to think about another lesson the two of you need to know: no religion has a monopoly on good or evil. There are good and bad people in every religion and the major world religions all emphasis the need for their practitioners to act ethically and morally. To believe that someone is evil simply because he practices a different religion than you is to misunderstand not only his religion, but your own religion. Likewise, to believe that someone is evil because of their race, gender, sexuality, or other immutable characteristic is ridiculous. There are too many genuinely bad people in this world to go hunting for the bad in good people. However, there are also too many genuinely good people in this world to assume that any whole group of people is somehow bad. The only person you hurt when you do this is yourself.