Hate Ain't Great

How can you hate me and not know me?

In veinte-veinte I wrote this thing, sort of a satirical sing-song thing because there was so much hate, discontent and vitriol going around. I called it "Ain't Hate Great?" The first verse went like this:

Ain't Hate Great?

You can do it in the morning

You can do it up late

You can do it in the evening

Or out on a dinner date

Ain't hate great?

The chorus to the song went like this:

No. It's not.

I'm still of the opinion that it pretty much sucks ass, hate. And I never did, never could, bring myself to finish the song.

Now, today, what I'm trying to sort through when I look up and I can see you looking and leaning over the parapet, is…

What the hell did I do to you?

Bigger than that, though, is this other, more troubling thing that keeps coming to me in both my sleeping and my waking hours: what is the world coming to? What's it going to be like when I'm gone?

I'm worried about my children, my children's children, so on and so forth.

My parents -- when I was young and impressionable -- my parents taught me to be nice to other folks, to treat them with courtesy, to respect your elders, to love your neighbor and your fellow (wo)man, to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Hate was like a four-letter word around my house. It was like a four-letter word everywhere I went, if I'm being honest. People taught their kids how to have common courtesy, common decency, common sense.

"Try to put yourself in their shoes, son."

That's what my dad used to say. He was teaching me empathy. Love, even.

And today? Today? Young and old alike are just trolling, trolling, trolling.

Trolling, trolling, trolling

Keep your anger strolling…

If you keep your anger and your hate handy, stroll around with it in your back pocket, your purse, your fanny pack --whatever- - it'll be there when you find what you're looking for: something to be mad about.

Well, here's something I'm mad about: I'm watching the CBS Early Show this morning, and they have a story--which has been published in several national papers, as well--about a woman who read 120 books this year.

Quite an accomplishment. Good for her.

So, like so many people do these days, she went onto one of the social media platforms and humble-brag-posted her stats, which garnered claps and likes and loves and the so forth.

And comments, too, of course.

Oh, you know, lots of folks are all about it:

"You go, girl!"

"Great job"

"Well done. I can't get past the third page of a book without falling asleep…"

And so forth.

Then, though…somebody starts with the, "Oh, smut doesn't count. You have to read good fiction for it to count. Smut reading is like reality-TV-watching."

I'm using quotes here, but those aren't direct quotes, of course. What they are, though, is emblematic, symbolic, and they do signal the direction the comments were going after that. Can you guess which direction that is?

Ain't hate great?

No, it sucks, and I hate it.

I wish the hate volcano had spewed its last piece of vitriol and it had dried, inert on the ground, so we could walk around on it like a lava field in Hawaii, see it under our feet, but never have to worry about it any more.

Sigh. Ain't gonna happen.

I saw, too, this morning, that representatives from both sides of the aisle in Montana came together to pass some Medicare or Medicaid legislation for their constituents, something to help the people of their state. Great story, right?

Yeah…but, no.

No. No. No.

You can't be getting in bed with the enemy, so we're gonna censure you. You voted with the Democrats? You won't be voting anymore at all now.

So, yeah. The representatives in question were censured, punished by their party peers, taking their votes away in future legislative proceedings.

Nice.

I want to be able to say, "It's what it's," like my son always says. But it isn't what it should be. It's not what it's supposed to be!

So, back to my original question: How can you hate me and not even know me?

I could say all the trite things like, "I feel sorry for you for all the anger you have pent up."

I could say, "You know, when I was young, my mom used to say if all you can say is, 'What the hell's the matter with you?' then you shouldn't say anything at all."

So…I won't be saying anything at all.

But I needed to do some cathart-ing here, because I got blind-kicked in the Jimmy again this morning by someone I don't even know over something I know nothing about and something I completely don't understand.

A few years ago, when I was still working outside the home, I read a thing written by Alan Alda on empathy. Empathy sort of became his thing here in the past decade or longer, I guess. Anyway, I happened upon it one morning when I was spending far too much time on my computer and far-not-enough time getting ready to go to work.

Alda was talking about how he came home late one evening and his wife was asleep on the couch. The dishes were stacked to the ceiling and his internal thermometer was moving up into the high danger-red zone.

Then he had an epiphany. What was she gonna feel like when she got up in the morning and saw those dishes still sitting there? When he put himself in her shoes-- kinda like my dad used to tell me -- he decided to knock out the dishes himself before he traipsed off to bed.

The empathy epiphany hit me that morning, too, and I opted to clean up the kitchen before I went to work. I was already late, anyway, because I dicked around on the computer for too long. For that, I could only blame myself.

The moral to that story? My wife called me at work and thanked me for doing the dishes that morning.

Oh, and also: you might consider this essay my shoes. Try them on. Please.

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© 2025 Canute Limarider: All Rights Reserved. This here story was made with these two hands and this one brain on my MacBook Air. I hope you enjoyed it.