Why Hate?

Originally published April 13, 2019

Gosh is anyone else tired of all the meanness going on in our great USA right now? I sure am. I understand that we all have opinions, we all have things that make us crazy but in my 1/2 century on this earth I’ve never seen such bat-$h!t crazy behavior.

My Mom always reminded her eight children that ‘hate’ was a strong word and should never be used lightly. She was referring to when someone says it about another human being and not when you say, “I hate cooked carrots” (which I do by the way). Mom worked as a teacher’s assistant for over 20 years and she worked with special needs children. She saw how they were pigeon holed and judged because they couldn’t read as fast or didn’t look or dress the same as the other kids. My Mother’s mission was to make these children understand that they weren’t worth any less than the smartest or most popular kid in the school and they had just as much opportunity as the next kid, but they’d have to work a little harder for it. She tried to help them understand being in the in-crowd wasn’t all that! But kids are trying to find their place in the world, so to them it is, all that!

Adults are no better than children most of the time. We judge, jury and sentence people in our minds every single day and not because we are armed with good information, but because we follow the crowd, just as we did in school if it aligns with the narrative we want to hear.

For instance, there is this terrible hate for our current president and I don’t get it …and I mean this sincerely – I really don’t get it. (keep reading this is not about politics)… The hate is palpable, from the simple person on the street to the news anchors that report on him and for the life of me I sincerely don’t know what the man has done to those individuals to earn such hatred except be elected. I mean, had he been in office for a year and people had an opinion of that nature I might think, “Ok, they just don’t’ like his leadership;” but he has been literally hated from the time he was on his campaign trail. I mean, yes, he can be annoying, but I find it hard to believe that all that hate manifested simply because the possibility of the first woman president was crushed; that seems a far-fetched reason for this much hate. Then I think, ‘well maybe it’s just because a non-politician was elected president.” Which leads me to think how proud I am of a country that has a democratic process where that can happen – regardless of my political affiliation. I believe in our bill of rights and constitution and the wonderful fore fathers that were so brilliant as to author such documents. Just as I love our God that came up with the oh-so sensible Ten Commandments. I mean really, how much more common sense can you get then those.

I worry about this kind of hate especially when it hit so close to home. Last year, we were verbally attacked while just being tourists in Wash D.C. simply for wearing a red hat. It was the day of the women’s march, for which we had no idea was going on. We were literally approached and spewed by hate filled rhetoric from a woman who decided that my husband’s red hat represented all things that were wrong with men and the USA at large and decided to hate on him. In the end her husband had to get a grip on her and literally drag her away – all the while she was screaming that we were fascists and WHY did we like ‘him’! This woman literally knew nothing about us, didn’t have a clue what our political affiliations were, but still boiled her thoughts down to a conclusion that caused her to spew hate the likes of which I’d prefer not to be part of ever again……and this is what I see and hear every day now. Conclusions being drawn, hate being spewed and in the end for no good reason AND it’s perfectly acceptable behavior by so many. I just don’t get it! (I know I keep saying that…).

It’s my two ‘sense’ that we’ve lost simple respect in this country and it’s going to be a hard-fought battle to get it back. The by-product of that loss has been hating imho. Taking away free speech isn’t the answer, but maybe thinking before we speak is – as my mother said, hate is a strong word and something we should think on before coming to it as a conclusion because you can’t take back hurtful words or actions for that matter.