I was diagnosed with leukemia, specifically Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia, nearly twenty years ago.

Fortunately, the health care and medical treatment that I had access to during those twenty years has given me the opportunity of surviving these twenty years.

There have been great advances made in the variety and effectiveness of cancer treatments during the time of my illness that have kept me alive. (For that reason, I am very confident that there will one day, if not this year then in the next, that we will have a cure for the coronavirus).

However, there is a cancer that will never have a cure.

It is a cancer that has ravaged this nation since its inception over two hundred and forty years ago.

You won’t find this particular type of cancer listed in the PDR, and, unfortunately, no researcher is working on a cure. There is no incentive to find a cure as there is more money to be made with the cancer than with the cure.

Hatred is the cancer.

We have always had hatred in this country. It is entombed and enshrined in our own Constitution, one of our most revered documents.

We hate people who are different in color, who talk differently than the white majority, who may be from a country that is deemed inferior, and we have instutionalized this hatred.

We have done this to many different groups of people for all sorts of reasons. We hated the Irish because they dared to be Catholic and poor; we hated the Jews because they were Jews; we hated Italians because they were Catholic, didn’t speak English, and were poor. We hated the Chinese because they looked different than whites. We put Japanese Americans in internment camps during WWII because they looked more like Japanese than Americans.

What our nation did to blacks and what it continues to do to blacks is a moral obscenity.

I really thought that there would be a great awakening after this terrible coronavirus had been eliminated. I really thought we as a nation would begin to address the ongoing problem of homelessness, poverty, and economic inequality.

With over forty million unemployed, it seemed to be a no-brainer that a new world order would be necessary to bring America out of this despicable time and into the twenty-first century.

Sadly, instead, we have lapsed back into the eighteenth century.

I don’t know what kind of hatred made that cop kill George Floyd. I only know that we have to do something about it.

Removing this hatred from our country is never going to result from a government law or program. For one thing, our government rather enjoys and benefits from the existing hatred and has absolutely no reason to end it.

No, we are on our own to stop the hatred.

Removing this type of disease requires another form of social distancing.

We can no longer be silent.

We can no longer accept sentiments expressed in our presence that propagates this type of disease.

I am embarrassed to write that I have been too complacent in this regard. Not wishing to create a scene or to start an uncomfortable conversation, I have taken the silent approach. No more.

I will remove myself from all hate speech.

Just walk away.

Block on Twitter.

Delete on Facebook.

I sincerely hope that if I offend anyone on these media that they do the same.

We don’t need each other if we cannot agree that Hatred is the New Cancer.