On Hating "People"

Let's start with a story.

A seven-year-old incurs the wrath of an elementary school teacher [for being a mouthy prick]. He says he hates her. She asks if a child so young can understand the meaning of the word "hate." He says it means "extreme dislike." The teacher is taken aback, but she punishes him (ingeniously) by holding his hand for the rest of the day.

Suffise to say, I was the young boy, and those were my words.

Hey, don't insinuate I don't know what words mean.

Moving on from that, lets flash forward to a lesson I learned just recently: people want you to mind your own damned business. If someone is vomiting for nearly half an hour, I tend to think "unusual." But now I know that drunks are superhuman in their ability to lose all cognitive ability, motor and bowel control, general common sense, but still retain an ability to enjoy the experience. Don't get in the way of a college student's buzz, ladies and gentlemen.

It seems that the first two years of college are not for figuring out what career path you'd like to pursue, but how much damage you can do to yourself and still get up the day after next.

Perhaps I'm just irritated being the only person in my entire social milieau that's straight-edge. For those unfamiliar with the term, it means no alcohol, no cigarettes, no weed, no opiates. Some people cut out other things like caffeine too, or blend it with being vegan. I'm not a morning person, so I need caffeine from time to time. I need the life energy of dead animals for power, so I eat meat and animal products. I'm trunctuating the socio-political aspects of this movement, but you've obviously got the internet, so look it up.

But back to hating "people." We all have biases and prejudices that poison our interactions with certain individuals (rent Oscar nominated film Crash). And over time we feel our biases are founded enough that we will always dislike meeting and talking to ceratin types of people: conservative businessmen in suits, young ambercrombie aficionados with purposely waxy hair, dark dressed goths who are "misunderstood" and like it that way, human chatterboxes (male and female) with loud, boisterous voices that seldom need a responsive partner to talk, pasty males with glasses and unkempt hair who focus primarily on toys, games, and comic books.

Is it better to hate people on an individual basis? Hating Steve, but not all Steves. Hating the one Hispanic guy at work, but not all Hispanics. Hating women who lie about their availability just because they aren't interested, but not all women.

It's a fairly self-destructive emotion to instinctually feel contempt towards someone, no matter how personally you know them. You expend a great deal of energy feeling and thinking this way, you aggravate health issues and you generally make other people feel bad with your unconscious behavior.

Then again, getting called a "duchebag" makes it hard to like a person you've never met before.