When I
learned in seventh grade that they’d changed the names of hamburgers and
frankfurters during the war, I realized how far things really could go. I mean honestly, such dislike, hatred,
abhorrence for other human beings that you couldn’t even keep a food’s given
name. And it seemed an entire
society wholeheartedly agreed that this is as it should be. Start a war with us and we will hate
you one and all. We may love your
food, may adopt them as our own - (uniquely American some even claimed) – but
those names have got to go.
It might
have been this precise kind of blind hatred that had led to all that bullying
my younger daughter suffered back in elementary school. She had never quite fit in, but when
the other girls discovered not only did she not attend church every Sunday, but
she actively dis-believed in a god, that’s when the taunting and name calling
began in earnest. At recess, on
the lunch line, after school as they filed out to the buses. Constant taunting about her
“godless-ness.” Her inevitable path to rot in hell.
But Johanna
never let on. Until the holiday break, that is. And that’s when it all came
out. And after the new year she
absolutely refused to return to the Martine Avenue School. She just flat out said “No more. No
way. I cannot. I will not.”
What makes
children such blind haters of what they don’t understand? Why is it they can see a fallen bird’s
need for care and tenderness, but in a human they see as “different” “other”
they can almost instantly find such unabashed hatred?
I ask the
questions, but actually, I know the answer. It’s us. The
grown-ups. We make the hate. We share our poison small-mindedness
with our kids, and then overnight we transform them from wide-eyed,
smile-at-the-world creatures into beings of hate-all-differences. They want to dress the same, walk the
same, talk the same, be the same. And they find no tolerance – none - for difference and "other."
And so the
hating begins.
So what’s my excuse? Where does
my hate come from? My parents were
anything but small- minded.
Acceptance of 'other' was their credo – their religion. They worked to
accept all, taught us to accept all, and expected with enough righteousness,
the rest of the world would eventually see the light and their five decades of
activism would have paid off.
But I do hate. I can’t help but hate.
Okay, maybe it’s not the same kind of hate. Maybe it’s not the poison kind
of hate. It’s not a personal,
directed-at-an-individual kind of hate.
I hate hypocrisy. I hate small-mindedness. I hate only-one-way-and-it’s-my-way. I hate those who claim to lead but
really do nothing more than control.
Leading implies following, and following isn’t really following if you
have no choice. That would be more
accurately called coercing, or co-opting, or indoctrinating, or dragging, or
just plain scaring.
I want to not hate. I’d rather
persuade-to-change-their-evil ways. I’d prefer, “you’re so right – I never
thought about it like that before.” I’d be more interested in transformation
and change, than what I feel right now - the hate of a despot who thinks
they’re a leader, the fury at a dictator who believes they’re
inspirational.
I get so twisted
sometimes by the cognitive dissonance required to live in this world as a
person with opinions, strong ideas, and righteousness.
Okay, so it's not really hate.
Maybe it's better to call it confusion and dismay.
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