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Wednesday, June 02, 2004
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ALL KIDDING ASIDE
I found this at Dispatches From the Culture Wars. The link contains a letter to the editor of a Vermont newspaper from the mother of a gay son. It's a pretty touching memorial to what must have been a hellish childhood, particularly in a place like Vermont. I live in a major metropolitan city. My city has the third largest gay community in North America. Smaller, more religious places must be a brutal atmosphere to grow up gay in.
Most of my readers, especially my longer term readers, will recognize that this blog serves one purpose and one purpose alone, to vent my hatred. I try to do it in as amusing a way as I can and, if it entertains the 10,000 of you who have visited, great. But does it remains my outlet for my contempt.
As insanely out of control as that contempt may seem, I do try to keep it reasonably focused and rationally explained. When I actually go back and re-read my archieves or previous posts (which isn't very often. My hatred for myself is so much more intense than it is for everyone else), I find myself surprised at just how often I'll qualify statements. Almost as often, I'll explain opposing viewpoints, if only to better attack them, but I DO make that effort. It's only been recently that I've noticed just how often I do that. I should read me more often, I guess.
My hatred is very special to me. I pamper the bitter ball of contempt that resides in the pit of my stomach as I imagine most of you would pamper a pet. My anger is pretty much the only thing about being me that I actually like. As a consequence, I try not to coarsen it with stupidity.
Try as I might, I just can't bring myself to loathe people based on what they were born. I prefer to hate them for what they do and what they think. Hating people as individuals is far more precious than hating them as a group. Hate works in exactly the same way love does. Anyone who "loves the White Race" is just as much of a crackpot as someone who decries other races. That the same person often says both things sort of defeats my argument, I know. But I suspect you get the point.
If you insist on hatred as a way of life, at least have the self-respect to make it a hatred you can be proud of. Make sure it's a hatred that you can sit down and discuss with children and still be able to look at yourself in the mirror afterward. I've said plenty of hateful things here, and I'll bet that I'd be willing to repeat each and every one of them. Are some wildly exaggerated for comedic effect? Sure. I'm just not going to tell you which ones are.
I'd love to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. Mostly because I envy the innocence that comes with being out of touch with reality. This is most perfectly found in the retarded. I'm not taking shots at the retarded, I'm actually serious. There are people who are so profoundly disabled that they have no idea just how disturbing the world can be, and they are often the happiest people you'd ever meet. They also probably have better HTML skills than I do and don't feel compelled to spend hours a day writing this drivel just so strangers will love them.
I honest to God envy those people. But I long ago came to the conclusion that I'll never be one of them. I'm a different kind of brain damaged.
Much is made of the negative power of hatred and almost nothing is said of its positive power. It's been said that the only man that Dwight Eisenhower ever hated was Adolf Hitler. It's reasonable to suspect that Martin Luther King hated segregation. Well, Hitler and segregation are gone and I think most of us can agree that the world is a better place for it. Would they be gone without that hatred? Hard to say. But it could be argued that hatred can be a powerful positive force as much as it can be a negative one.
But for hatred to have any positive energy it should always be directed at what people do or what they say, as oppossed to what they are.
Well, except for the Kulaks. I think we can all agree about them.
In any event, I'm not sure what any of this drivel has to do with that woman's letter about her son. I should probably stick to dick jokes and diatribes about Gloria Allred.
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