I can’t remember the last time I hated anything. Oh yes, I’ve hated lima beans my whole life. I’ve never cared for beets, either. I don’t like peas, but I don’t hate them. I don’t know if it’s the taste, the texture, or a combination of the two, but even if I don’t care for peas, I do eat them. I’ve even taken seconds, small seconds, that is.
My hating goes beyond foods. I hate being late. I hate it when others are late, too. I hate being talked down to. I hate having to say something only to find that no one is listening. I hate being criticized. So it’s foods, being ignored, and a few other social interactions that I hate.
I can’t remember the last time that I hated anyone, though. *I asked my neighbor Bob Frassetto if, after a neighbor-to-neighbor misunderstanding, he was ever going to talk to me again, and he sized me up and down, paused, and said, “you disgust me.” I didn’t hate him for that. I felt somewhat sorry for him for feeling that way, believing that it’s painful to carry around hate, much more for the hater than the hatee. Yes, we still don’t talk, but I would. He’s the one carrying the burden. Hating someone is an unwelcome affliction. Seneca said that anger (and hatred) is “an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.”
Why do we hate? We fear things that are different from us. My brother in law posted this on Facebook this morning:
Mind you, this is just a partial list.
We also hate because we reject what we don’t like about ourselves. Brad Reedy, a psychologist, describes this in the Freudian term “projection”, our need to be good, which causes us to project “badness’ outward and attack it. We think, he continues, that this is how one rids oneself of undesirable traits, but in reality it only perpetuates repression which leads to mental health issues.
I believe that this is at the heart of Donald Trump’s issues. He lashes out, criticizes, and attacks not only anyone who disagrees with him but is different from him. On Memorial Day he attacked a Democratic congressman, Conor Lamb, a Marine Corps veteran. It was only a small part of his attacks.
The headline read,
“On weekend dedicated to war dead, Trump tweets insults, promotes baseless claims and plays golf”
The problem isn’t that Trump hates. It’s been long established that he does, that he has no empathy for others, that his modus operandi is to lash out, attack, criticize, demean, and insult. It’s the only way he knows how to comport himself. He is also indifferent when his hating drags along innocent parties. In his tweetstorm on Memorial Day he referred to the death of a 29 year old intern of archenemy Joe Scarborough, suggesting that Scarborough might have murdered her, although he was nine hundred miles away when she died. Her widower is once again reliving the pain of her death because of the mindlessness of a brain that one person suggests is like “six fireflies blinking inside a bottle.” Without hating he would only expose the emptiness inside himself, the meaninglessness of his own existence. He would have to recognize what so many others have known for years, that as Gertrude Stein is reputed to have said about Oakland, “there’s no there there.”
No, the problem isn’t that Trump hates. The problem is more personal—that I hate him. *I began this essay by trying to remember the last time I hated another human being. I have hated him since before he was elected, and that hate has only grown in the years that he’s been in office. What’s crucial for me is to recognize something else that I mentioned earlier in this essay—that hatred is a burden, and that carrying it around weighs down the hater, not the hatee. Sometimes I wish Trump knew how much I (and so many others) hated him. I suspect that he might, though, because in the inner sanctum of his emptiness is the knowledge that he can never consciously confront that he will never be respected, never liked, never loved, that his predecessor was everything he wishes he could but never will be. And knowing that deep in his subconscious causes him to lash out. Again. And again.
And for me? I accept that the antidote to hate is forgiveness and compassion. Ultimately, forgiveness is about letting go, taking appropriate actions to protect oneself. I feel no compassion for Trump. I can’t forgive him, either. I am able, however, to “let go”, to protect myself, and in doing so, recognize that when there’s no there there, there’s nothing that prevents me from moving forward and living without the burden of hate.