Looking for Someone to Hate

This is not a generous time in America’s history. There are always difficult times, but this time it appears that a large number of people are looking for someone or something to hate.

It’s not easy finding something credible to hate because there seem to be fashions. Thirty years ago, people hated the Women’s Lib movement because it upset too many apple carts. Talking about uppity women these days, for example, sounds really old-fashioned. The hate on that topic died when the Equal Rights Amendment didn’t pass—life as we knew it was preserved and equal rights went on to be supported in other ways.

Hatred, I’m told, is born out of insecurity. There’s nothing more likely to trigger that insecurity than not having a support group of like-minded individuals. Apparently, the group that hates together stays together. But I do think there’s also an element of desperately clinging to things as they (never) were and demanding that life conform. In this, there’s an element of arrogance and also King Canute-ism: he’s the king who commanded the tide not to turn with predictable results.

According to the latest reports, there are over 900 hate groups in the US. Traditional hatred is well represented among them. There are anti-semitic, anti-gay, anti-Muslim, anti-abortion, anti-government, and anti-ethnic groups just for starters. You can even start your own rant: one man was so angry over a zoning decision up in Granby, Colorado, that he built a home-made tank and tried to take out the town. Of course, he was the exception to being part of a group since he didn’t much like people period. But he shows the common denominator of these groups: hating requires release through violence and builds on a shared sense of injustice and threat.

Case in point: what motivated the 88 year-old bigot to start shooting in the Holocaust Museum? As one might predict it started with the mundane and banal: he thought he was shortchanged in his Social Security check as retaliation for the venom he had been spewing on his increasingly deranged website. I can imagine him working himself into a frenzy of hatred by imagining that others, people definitely not-him like minorities or in this case, Jews, were getting the things “due” to him. Let a few visitors to his website agree with him and the only outlet for the pent-up emotion becomes taking a rifle and opening fire. I’m not discounting the possibility of senile hyperactivity but it seems his whole life had been one long grievance.

And grievance is really what all this hate is about. We have a whole lot of people with grievances against a changing world that is not behaving as it should and they fear they are losing their place along with all the certainties they had believed in. The more threatening the changes the more hatred .

Well, I have news for the hatred groups of this country: You never were in charge of your world. You only thought you were because it was familiar. You were just as powerless as the rest of us in the face of technological change, political expedience, and cultural diversity. It’s just taken you a lot longer than the rest of us to become aware of it. To a certain extent, we have all been cheated. We believed our values were the only right ones and, in some instances, we gave our lives and our futures for them. But our values were only loaned to us and only because they were useful to the world at the time we were encouraged to believe them.

Let’s move on, guys, and get out of the way of the people who have to deal with today’s world. It’s theirs now and they’ll have their own illusions and disappointments.