hate: winging it

more notes from my lecture:
Dovetailing the question "What is love?" is the question "What is hate?" Hate, like love, is one word and, well, usually one word tells us less not more.

However, American English journalist Andrew Sullivan does an exquisite job of trying to tell us more in his essay "What's So Bad about Hate," which--in a provocative twist--ends in the verdict that hate is an "unwinnable" war that is best left "unfought."

He posits that there are as many varieties of hate as there are of love: There is hate that fears, and hate that merely feels contempt; there is hate that expresses power, and hate that comes from powerlessness. There is revenge, and there is hate that comes from envy. There is hate that was love, and hate that is a curious expression of love. There is hate of the other, and hate of something that reminds us too much of ourselves. There is the oppressor's hate, and the victim's hate. There is hate that burns slowly, and hate that fades. And there is hate that explodes, and hate that never catches fire.

Finally, he says that "Hate, like much of human feeling, is not rational, but it usually has its reasons."

On a whiter note, things are looking up here in Cleveland: the small mountains of snow that have temporarily lined the streets and parking lots on the east side since early January are in fact melting. Since Wednesday, several missing troops of blue-lipped Girl Scouts with order sheets and jars of dollars frozen in their arms have been uncovered. This in my eyes is a satisfactory explanation as to why no one even tried to sell me thin mints when I needed them most. So, rest assured, people: while you may be stumbling around a bit and bumping into things due to sun-induced blindness (eerily reminiscent of crawling out of a dark cave or coming out of the birth canal, right?), excavation continues and Samoas are doubtlessly and mercifully and LOVINGLY on their way...

hate is a very specific brand of love...

So apparently I'm the genius who in January scheduled a two-week-long lecture series for my college classes on the topic of Love. WHAT??!!! Had I looked ahead on my syllabus last week, I would have skipped ahead to something a little less dark, perhaps Hamlet or Milton's "Paradise Lost."

Love? The way I see it, "love" can mean everything or nothing at all.

Surprisingly I came across some noteworthy thoughts on the subject. bell hooks writes "Our confusion about what we mean when we use the word 'love' is the source of our difficulty in loving."

M. Scott Peck, though, pegs it best: Love is as love does. Love is an act of will--namely both an intention and an action. Will implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.

Amen.

Tomorrow: Hate--winging it

Raisins and gorillas...

Just when I thought things couldn't get any worse, on February 21 a reporter from The Vindicator wrote a story about several recent UFO sightings in northeastern Ohio. Anyone who knows me well knows that aliens rank right up there with cantaloupe, gorillas, and raisins on my supposedly irrational but defensible list of things that frighten me. (I know there are people out there who feel me on the raisins: how many times have you bit into a perfectly good oatmeal cookie only to encounter a squishy grape that feels like larvae in your mouth?)

Turns out at least 25 sightings have been reported in our area in the last year, which of course means that there have been more. We can safely assume, I think, that only a small percentage of people who have seen UFOs flying about would actually admit they are the kind of people who actually have seen UFOs flying about.

Since I don't have Sigourney Weaver's number, I'm thinking of contacting Forbes Magazine. Perhaps the editors who so thoroughly revealed Cleveland as the worst, most miserable city to live in the country a few weeks ago could tweet the aliens and let them know that, really, their efforts are lost on Cleveland. They'd be better off, according to some very convincing data, to drop in on Burbank, CA; Amityville, NY; Gary, Indiana; or apparently EVEN DETROIT.