How I Learned to Hate (End)

The teachers I worked with: Sergei, Galya, Tanya, Little Rabbit were wonderful and warm hearted. Kolobok, (Little Loaf of Bread) Sergei’s mother, treated me like her own son. Nearly everyone I met was loving, enduring, affectionate, resilient and most of all resourceful people. Shouldn’t I hate idealistic notions and any attempt to unilaterally impose them on the unwilling? Why should I hate this country and its rich and glorious history? Shouldn’t I rather hate violations of freedom, selfish imposition of some leader’s desires and invasion instead? On Red Square, I wrestled with demons and the hate demons lost. It wasn’t the Russians who killed Fish. It was war that killed him. Nobody wins a war, one side just loses more.

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.    At Fish’s funeral, Taps was followed by another military tradition – the 21 gun salute. Each firing of a gun was like the pounding of a hammer on a nail that attached a poster inscribed with the word HATE on it into my heart. However, each precious moment I spent with the real Russian people, living and wanting to enjoy their lives as well, working hard and dreaming of a better life, loving and caring for me, a nail was loosened and discarded till finally they were all gone and my hatred with them. Abe Lincoln was right when he said, “Am I not destroying my enemies, when I make them my friends?”

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     Not six months after I became free of my hatred for those lovely people, they too became free, when the Berlin walls in Germany came down and communism began to crumble and fade away as well.