They Have Earned Our Hate

We are forever told, in those soft, linen-napkin tones of polite America, that hate is beneath us. That we must rise above. That the republic is best tended by people who do not let their blood boil, who can watch a slow-motion desecration of their country and respond with a chin-stroking op-ed about norms.

But there are seasons in a nation’s life (and, to confess, as the age of 62 approaches, my own) when anger is not only permissible but mandatory, when the moral response is not to forgive, not to forget, not to “move on,” but to name the rot and hold it in the light, to cut it out, cast it down, and scatter its ashes.

This is one of those seasons. Perhaps it’s because I woke up to the news that my old boss Dick Cheney had passed. Perhaps it’s because my shit filter for the cruelty and degradation on our streets and in our lives wrought by his crapulous President and his claque of criminal sycophants is full to bursting.

Perhaps it’s the endless, gleeful reveling in the hunger of poor people wrought by the Trump Shutdown. Perhaps it’s just the long, wearing fight where I’ve had too many people whisper “save us” but then shout the required catechism of Trumpism at the first smell of gunpowder.

Perhaps, and it’s almost certainly this, a woman asked me yesterday, “I keep trying not to hate, and I feel so bad that I hate him, and them.”

But today, this chilly November morning, I’m offering up a dispensation, friends.

They have earned our hate.