Hate and anger
Recently someone said to me; “I don’t want to sound disrespectful, but…”
Here’s a hint. When a sentence begins; “I don’t want to sound ‘X’, but…” you can be quite certain that what follows will be so revoltingly ‘X’ that you could see it from space with the naked eye. Except the person saying it, will be completely blind to it. No one feels the need to deny thoughts they don’t have.
This last campaign season has been one long festival of denial. NO, of course we don’t hate blacks, or gays, or atheists, but…
At least Ann Coulter is honest about it. She doesn’t pretend not to hate.
Here are some hatreds I make no effort to deny. I hate Bill O’Reilly and I especially hate Sean Hannity. I’d love to wipe the whiny-smug douche-baggy looks off both their faces. (If you don’t know what that kind of look looks like, look at Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity.)
I hate George W. Bush. I don’t want anything bad to happen to him, other than for him to go back to Crawford, Texas in 63 days (Yes, I have the countdown timer in my web browser) and spend time with crayon and newsprint writing his memoirs. Thank God and Greyhound you’re gone, jerk; you did more damage to my country than Al Queda could ever dream of doing. It’s going to take a generation to fix it, if it can be fixed.
Clearly I am also angry at all those individuals. Neither hate or anger are constructive states of mind. But they are human. Tribalism is human, too, but so is taking constructive action, in spite of negative thoughts and feelings. I admire people who can pull it off, (Barack Obama comes to mind) and I mean to keep trying.
It is significant when hate (and anger) appear. If you hate an individual you know nothing about other than their membership in some demographic, that’s prejudice. They’re gay, or black, or Muslim, or atheist, or whatever. If you hate someone you do know something about, because they did something bad, that’s anger. If we try to keep our hatreds down to just individuals, we’ll go a long way toward managing conflict and resolving differences. The trouble comes when we start hating entire groups.
Well-said. Know what you mean. It kills me when anger over individual actions is equated with prejudice, normally by the prejudiced themselves. “Why are atheists so angry?” has been one of my favorites since that meme started recently. It’s like, “Gee, I don’t know. It has nothing to do with history, the retardation of reason and perversion of science, or the corruption of liberal democracy due to actions inspired by religion. I guess it’s just bigotry on my part instead.”
Anyway, it’s nice to have an English-speaker (with a wife that speaks, to boot) and a human with an IQ coming soon to the White House. Eight years has felt like 40.
Well said George! And you’ll be happy to know I have tried to monitor my use of the word “but”. But… it’s not easy. :bug: :cheese:
Well put Clay. It has been a long 8 years for sure, and will likely be a longer next 8 as Obama works to clean things up.
Well just for you, I used the word ‘but’ in two consecutive sentences back there. To make you feel at home. Noticed it after it was posted.
I think it was Jon Stewart who said; “American finally overcame centuries of stereotype and prejudice, and called upon a black man to clean up the mess made by a white man.”
Well-spoken.
It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot, lately. You summed it up more succinctly than I could have (I’m not as good at that as I’d like).
Well said! I agree with you.
I hate George Bush enough to want him to be hauled off in handcuffs in 56 days (yes, I have a counter on my blog site too). And 53 days is far to long for me. I wish they’d just slam the door on him now and let Obama take over.
And Bill O’Reilly, just plain makes me want to upchuck my lunch! That guy is a pervert.
OK. I’ll take a deep breath and stop now.