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Tag: hatred

It’s a Mad Mad World

Published on April 11, 2025

I keep coming back to hatred, not only because there seems to be so much of it around right now – not simmering just under the surface like it has most of my life; no now it’s raised it’s ugly, misshapen, and rotting head out of the dirt and slime where it was born. Out in the open, as my dad used to say, so “any fool can plainly see, and you can see it plainly.”

I get it. Anger is easy. That’s where it starts. Anger and fear and maybe a slight sense of being overwhelmed. It’s just a slight skip and a jump from there to the edges of remorseless dislike. There on the outskirts of reason and decency, where the wolves your society insists it isn’t still feeding are hungrily waiting for you, is where hatred is bred, birthed, suckled, weaned, toilet-trained, and otherwise educated.

No one is actually born afraid. That’s learned behavior, some of it instinctually triggered and the rest of it institutionally indoctrinated as you reach out to understand yourself, your world, and your place in it.

Once you learn fear, that single path that’s been right under your feet your whole life up to that point splits, or poetically, diverges into two roads at the edge of a yellow wood. Dualism in full effect. Us sees them. Inside wants outside. Light fights darkness. Death haunts life. What was once a flowing piece of ballet is now a tortured two-step, a lock-step. That mechanical march becomes martial. Lines are drawn to be crossed. Insults are hurled as a precursor to more material objects. It escalates because that’s what a well-lit stairway to paradise does. It leads the faithful to the hereafter.

But hatred cannot win. Because from hatred nothing can grow. It has no life without your energy. Without your legs it cannot stand.

It doesn’t matter who or what you hate. You’re automatically not the good guy or girl. And I don’t mean good in the sense of proper, respectable, well behaved, appropriate, or genteel. No, I mean good as in being a decent, honest, compassionate, and worthwhile human being. If you pick up the armor of hatred, regardless of the evil of your enemy, you must leave your humanity in your locker with your street clothes. And you won’t be going home after your shift. That’s a life choice, isn’t it?

Is it worth it?

11 APR 2025

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Such a World: rondel

Published on May 8, 2017

What sense can you make of such a world
where kindness and consideration fail,
and ignorance, its angry, hard fist curled,
destroys all to build more graveyards and jails?

When hatred’s flag has been proudly unfurled,
has culture’s last ship onward set its sails?
What sense can one make of this world
when kindness and consideration fails?

Forget the single grain, the oyster’s pearl;
there is no private gold, no separate grail.
The ocean’s parts held in your tiny pail
show just a pattern’s glimpse, merely a purl.
What sense can you make of such a world?

08 MAY 2017

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Instrument of God

Published on July 12, 2005

You call yourself an instrument of God,
selected to seek vengeance for some wrong;
I wonder, do you ever think it odd
that retribution should be your sole song,

that God, who has a symphony of life
to call upon or move on His behalf
should need your petty anger as his knife
to separate the good wheat from the chaff?

How brazen, that you think you know what irks
God most, that your convictions reflect His;
How hypocritical to think your bloody works
can ease some Divine pain. What sad hubris!

What’s more, an instrument that only doles
out death — what a small repertoire indeed!!
To think that funeral march alone extols
the virtues of your maker, or His needs,

supposes Him so helpless, small and weak;
no mountain, but a mere mud-spattered clod.
No wonder that He gives you leave to speak
to call yourself an instrument of God.

12 JUL 2005

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For Stephen Stills

Published on February 4, 2005

We have become so polarized. The lines
are drawn so black and thick between each side,
the pickets filled with stark and ugly words
that only emphasize a hate that grows

when one’s own thoughts have turned to stone
fit just for use as weapons behind walls,
where in a soldier’s stance we fear what change
would come if doubt encroached upon our minds.

Our single drops of rain gather for storms
that we would have directed at our foes;
yet as the skies turn somber and morose,
we each lament, and blame the restless clouds.

Is this the force that would improve the world,
with great lambasting vitriol and spite?
Have we forgotten that the ends become
perverted by such cold and heartless means?

With scorn emblazoned on our barbed wire hearts,
we seek to prove our way the truth and light;
but bury any hope for growth or peace
and for compassion dig a shallow grave.

04 FEB 2005

What a field day for the heat
A thousand people in the streets
Singing songs, and a-carrying signs
Mostly say, “Hooray for our side”
— from For What It’s Worth,
by Stephen Stills and recorded by Buffalo Springfield
during the Vietnam War

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