Opinion | Post Occupy, Hong Kong must confront the hatred that poisons - in our own hearts
Alice Wu says after Occupy, we must root out the hatred that seems entrenched now in the community - by taking a hard look at ourselves
Clearing the streets will not clear the pain and suffering that have been inflicted on this city. We are all bleeding; no one has been spared. And neither is anyone singularly at fault.
We've lost our community. Long before the umbrella movement, the threads of civil society had begun to unravel. Some tried to warn us. One person, in particular, has been doing so for years. In fact, his annual Christmas messages plotted our unravelling.
The archbishop of the Hong Kong Anglican Church, Dr Paul Kwong - someone some of us have learned to love to hate, and hate to love - asked us, in 2009, to notice our easy acceptance of the not-in-my-backyard mentality; in 2010, to acknowledge our own role - our selfishness - in widening the wealth gap; in 2011, to be aware of our growing preference for mutual disrespect; in 2012, to see the futility in both improper governance and sensationalism, and the danger both have in propelling society into the "periphery of inhumanity"; and, last year, to return to reconciliation, civility and dialogue against the tendency to reach for hate and violence. Self-awareness is a difficult thing to ask, indeed.
It's easy to shut our ears to content we deem unsavoury. And, as a result, we've failed to see that hate does beget hate, and violence, violence. We let differences become a breeding ground for animosity and hatred. Tens of thousands may have been called to the streets to occupy with "love and peace", but we're now left with the organisers' love's labour's lost; what will remain with us are the anguish, hate and the violence that permeated well beyond the Occupy skirmishes.
We have nestled too comfortably in our echo chambers of confirmation bias, found excuses to shut out dissent, to silence and drown out differences. We've taken our grievances as entitlements to unleash our anguish on our neighbours and friends. We've failed to see that we weren't going for the root of our problems, but for each other's jugular.
We desperately now, as a community, need to rebuild what we have, as a community, destroyed. We have to reclaim normalcy, not as fools in sectioned-off communities separated by the colour of our ribbons, but as friends learning again to live together.