“All you need is love.”

— John Lennon and Paul McCartney

On Saturday, New York City was the location of a Ku Klux Klan rally. According to Beth Gardiner of the Associated Press, 16 Klan members stood outside a courthouse in lower Manhattan and rallied under the protection of police.

Gardiner said the crowd of protesters was estimated at about 6,000 people. The city of New York didn’t even give the Klan a sound system. I think it’s safe to say that no one wanted them there.

The Ku Klux Klan lights a fire inside of most people for the hate they have brought into the world against African-Americans. Since their formation, the Klan has beaten, killed, bombed, raped, etc., countless members of minority races. And why? For the simple fact that they are of a different race.

This seems to me to be the very definition of hate. And the Ku Klux Klan, in its despicable white robes and hoods, is a symbol of hatred in this country.

But the real hate on Saturday was displayed not by the Klansmen, but by the protesters. Three men snuck behind the police barricade and with a rallying cry, “Death to the Klan!” proceeded to attack several Klan members.

No doubt many cheered on as the attacks occurred. Most people would feel their actions were justified. I’m sure that people hearing the story cracked a smile at the thought of a Klansman being attacked. I know when I heard, my first instinct was to cheer, just as I cheered against the Ku Klux Klan in the violent scene of the movie “A Time to Kill.”

But aren’t these actions a little hypocritical? Though the protesters’ motives may have been purer than those of the Klansmen, an act of hatred makes them no better.

The same applies in all areas of life. For instance, on our campus last week, the “Week Without Violence” wall was vandalized with obscene messages. No doubt the motive behind this action was hate, and no doubt the emotion it stirred in most people was hate.

And on Wednesday night, 12 female Iowa State students were the victims of a prank caller. And these weren’t just any “your cat’s in my garden” prank phone calls; these women felt violated. The man who called them was motivated by hate, and I’m sure that all of the victims felt some kind of hate.

And hate is not just a reaction to acts of freedom and slavery and life and death like these, it also exists in much smaller venues where there was little to no motive at all. From a student hating a professor that gave him or her a bad grade to a person hating someone who wrote in a spiteful letter to the Daily to the guy who hates his boss for firing him. And though we are all part of the problem, I ask the question, what good does hating do?

Hate is not effectively protested by hate. All this is doing is bringing more hate into the world. And it seems to me that the people who are the cause of these actions have this as there ultimate goal: to live in a world full of hate.

But this world was not created to be a hateful place, and we were not created as creatures of hate. It is a man-made emotion that has been able to rage on and on until we have reached a point in history where a group based and rooted in hate is allowed to rally, and protesters are cheered on as they attack it. The way things are going now, hate will be allowed to rage on forever.

Somewhere, someway, a change has to be made.

The problem is that most people feel their hate is justified. I say – and I know I’m not alone – that it is not. We were created to be creatures of love: love for God and love for each other. This is clearly no longer the case.

Humans brought hate into this world, and unfortunately, it is here to stay. But it can be combatted. Not with hate, as we have tried for centuries, but with love.

This seems hard and almost impossible to do in a lot of situations. As we have seen, love is not our first instinct. I know this first hand. Of the 12 women who received harassing phone calls last Wednesday night, two were good friends of mine. And I don’t care how loving of a person you are, when something like that happens to one of your good friends, your only feelings are of hate.

But hate doesn’t have to be acted on. If we would stop, step back and take a deep breath, then maybe we wouldn’t act so harshly and feed the hate. And if we would further think of the person as another human being – another human being with wants, needs, feelings, hurts, goals, etc. – then maybe our hatred would fade. Then, somehow, someway, we might be able to forgive. And this would bring us one step closer to loving that person.

When hate is combatted with love, the hatred on all sides ceases because you can’t hate a person who genuinely loves you.

You may be annoyed at first by this person, but you don’t hate him or her. And more times than not, the love he or she shows will eventually win you over, until you are loving him or her back.

Love can win our world over. If everyone strives to love one another no matter the faults and weaknesses we all have, then we would live in a much happier place.

“And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. And the greatest of these is love.” — God

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Jackson Lashier is a junior in English from Marshalltown.