Travis Kriens/KORN News Radio
The recent shootings in Minneapolis are not about politics. They are about hate.
No right-minded person shoots someone they encountered seconds earlier. How you treat people is not politics. Treating someone as sub-human is not politics. That lives deeper than party labels or cable news chyrons. It lives in your core values—who you are when no one is cheering you on, who you are when fear and anger are all you have left.
If I had to sum up the last ten years in one word, it would be hate.
Hate for your neighbors.
Hate for people you’ve never met.
Hate for people who seem to have it better than you.
And sometimes, hate for yourself—because life didn’t turn out the way you thought it would.
That kind of hate doesn’t stay contained. It looks for an outlet. And too often, it finds one in a gun.
Being a fake tough guy with a weapon doesn’t make you strong. It doesn’t fix what’s broken in your life. It doesn’t fill the emptiness or quiet the rage. It only multiplies it. It leaves families shattered, communities traumatized, and a country even more fractured than it already was.
What makes Minneapolis so painful is not just the violence, it’s the dehumanization that followed. A man is dead. A son. A neighbor. An ICU nurse who spent his days caring for veterans, trying to keep people alive. And within hours, the machinery of hate kicked into gear: lies, smears, propaganda. Strip away the humanity, and suddenly anything becomes justifiable.
That’s how this works. Always has.
Once you decide someone is “other,” once you convince yourself they’re less than human, cruelty becomes easy. Violence becomes acceptable. Accountability becomes optional. And the worst part? Ordinary people, people we know, people we love, can transform into monsters at the snap of a finger, all while insisting they’re the good guys.
A lot of this hate comes from isolation. From never leaving your bubble. From never learning another culture, another story, another way of living. From mistaking fear for strength and ignorance for certainty. It’s an isolated way to live and a dangerous one.
In the end, none of this should be complicated. We are all just humans. I don’t care what country you’re from. I don’t care what language you speak or how you vote. At our core, we all want the same things: safety, dignity, and a better life for ourselves and the people we love.
So why is there so much hate for people we don’t know and have never met?
When does it end?
How does it end?
Do we survive it?
I didn’t realize until recently just how much hate some people carry in their hearts. It’s shocking. It’s disorienting. And it’s terrifying to watch it spill into the streets, backed by power, uniforms, and excuses.
This does not have to be who we are.
We don’t beat hate by pretending it’s politics. We beat it by calling it what it is, by refusing to normalize cruelty, and by choosing, over and over again, to see each other as human.
Because once we lose that, everything else goes with it.