~a column by Colleen O’Brien
“Putting the brakes on hate” is the motto of a non-profit called — what else? — HateBrakers.
Founder Susan Margolis Balk, who spent her career writing for the big boys – New York Times Magazine, Travel and Leisure, Playboy — launched HateBrakers, now in its third year, as a teaching tool. She is already transforming the culture in classrooms with her lesson plan called “Meet a Hero, Be a Hero: HateBraking 101,” as well as working with the citizens of Ferguson, Missouri to put the brakes on hate.
The point of her non-profit is to find people who interrupt the repetitive cycle of hate-breeds-hate and teach others how to do this also. Susan has discovered dozens of people all over the world hurt by hate or who hated others and hurt them. HateBraker Olive Mukabalisa witnessed her pregnant mother slaughtered beside her one night during the Rwandan genocide. Olive was 6. She was sent to America by a relief group and wound up in St. Louis, home of HateBrakers. She eventually attended Webster University and graduated as Outstanding Student with a masters in international relations. She joined HateBrakers and is now back in Rwanda teaching ravaged families how not to hate those who hurt them, teaching by example how to stop the cycle.
Another fellow, the perpetrator rather than the victim of hate, was released from prison after several years of serving time for a felony he won’t talk about. He joined HateBrakers after being offered a job in an organization that offers work to ex-felons, and he now gives talks in schools about his skinhead years. He was a tough, a self-styled macho jerk who hurt others without remorse. “I didn’t even know that blacks and Jews were the same as me,” he says now when speaking with at-risk students. “Talking about it is a way out,” he believes, both for himself and those he touches.
Learning to speak up against hate transforms perpetrators, victims and bystanders into leaders, healers and heroes. The organization not only seeks out these people but encourages journalists, bloggers and tweeters to report stories about those who hit the brakes on hate at least as often as they report hate crimes. HateBrakers has recently taken a leadership role to bring people together in Ferguson – scene of the violent death of an 18-year-old by a policeman – to understand individual and collective power used constructively to heal.
Sensitizing people starts a chain reaction of compassion and thoughtfulness just as desensitizing leads to callous treatment of others. Thinking that others are different from oneself, thinking that hurting someone else will give you yourself power, thinking that if you’ve been hurt why can’t you hurt others, thinking that it’s okay to bully, punch, hurt, kill . . . this is a perpetuation of sadness that leads to despair, for all of us. We see it or hear of it in the world every day and wonder what will become of us if this goes on.
Susan Margolis Balk’s HateBrakers is a small organization with a big agenda that has begun to alter the world toward a different way of being – toward hope, goodwill, even someday, no war. Now wouldn’t that be the breaking of a wearying and senseless cycle?
